A film, "Holding Back the Snowpack (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG8YWqSHF88) ," explores the suite of tools stakeholders in the Big Hole Valley are using to improve riparian habitat along the Big Hole River. The Big Hole Watershed Committee collaborates with a variety of partners to create life-giving wetlands in SW Montana. Taking cues from flood irrigation and beavers, natural water storage projects help us adapt to climate change by slowing spring runoff and soaking the soil sponge. The film highlights our pro-active work to increase the availability of water for all uses by making the most of abundant winter snowpack. Support our life-giving work by making a donation today at https://bhwc.org/giving/ Film production by FilmWest. Project funding: The Wildlife Conservation Society, Natural Resourced Damage Program, Montana Department of Environmental Quality, Montana Watershed Coordination Council, and Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. Project Partners and Contractors: BHWC, Water and Environmental Technologies, Watershed Consulting, Pioneer Technical, Morrison-Maierle, Basic Biological Services, and Montana Conservation Corps. photo credit: Big Hole Watershed Committee

Molly Cross, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), provides a summary about the online workshop she held with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD), related to their collaborative effort to incorporate climate change information and adaptation strategies into the 2020 revision of the WY Statewide Habitat Plan. In addition to supporting climate‐informed decisions by WGFD, this project is also designed to be a learning opportunity on methods and approaches to coproducing and co‐synthesizing climate science that is relevant and used in management decisions. Molly shares some of the content of what was discussed (related to the WY Statewide Habitat Plan), in addition to her experience doing co‐production work in a virtual setting.

Max Joseph of the NC CASC and Earth Lab provides an overview of the Climate Futures Toolbox, a new tool developed by the NC CASC. About the CFT: Managers and climate impacts researchers face multiple pain points when trying to use climate projection data: discovery, access, and usage. There are multiple global climate model repositories (CMIP3, CMIP5), multiple downscaling techniques (MACA, BCSD, LOCA), and multiple file formats. Each product has different spatio‐temporal resolutions, different climate variables, and different limitations. The investigator team proposed to develop and implement the Climate Futures Toolbox (CFT), a seamless R‐code workflow to ingest historic and projected climate data and generate summary information and customizable graphics for user‐defined time periods and regions of interest. Project goals include: creating a lower barrier to entry for climate data consumers that use R; automating scenario planning data tasks; empowering a larger user community; and reducing potential for errors. The investigator team was committed from the start to creating the CFT as an open‐source and openworkflow tool and to engaging management partners directly in the tool design. We hope that this contributes to the lifetime of the tool by allowing others to contribute future code to summarize climate data in new and different ways as user needs evolve and new data become available.

Alisa Wade, USGS Research Coordinator, NC CASC, provides a brief overview of stakeholder engagement for creating actionable science.

Post-fire conifer regeneration in a changing climate. Kimberley Davis and Philip Higuera, University of  Montana. Abstract: Managers tasked with maintaining forest ecosystems and the services they provide are challenged by the combined impacts of increasing wildfire activity and more stressful post-fire climate conditions. To understand how climate change may affect post-fire regeneration, we examined the relationship between annual climate and post-fire tree regeneration of two dominant, low-elevation conifers (ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir) using annually resolved establishment dates from 2820 destructively sampled trees from 32 wildfires across four regions in the western US. We showed that at dry sites across our study region, seasonal to annual climate conditions over the past 20 years have become increasingly unsuitable for regeneration, thus creating increasing uncertainty for managers about where they can expect forest recovery following fire. Given the recent increase in area burned across the West, managers often need to stretch limited resources for post-fire reforestation efforts. To help address these challenges, we are applying our models relating post-fire regeneration to annual climate conditions and other biophysical predictors to create a tool that predicts probability of post-fire regeneration within recent fire boundaries. The tool will help managers prioritize management actions, such as tree planting. We will discuss the recent application of this tool to a fire in western MT in collaboration with foresters from The Nature Conservancy.