Climate change is causing an increase in the amount of forested area burned by wildfires in the western U.S. The warm, dry post-fire conditions of the region may limit tree regeneration in some areas, potentially causing a shift to non-forest vegetation. Managers are increasingly challenged by the combined impacts of greater wildfire activity, the significant uncertainty about whether forests will recover, and limited resources for reforestation efforts. Simultaneously, there has been an increased focus on post-fire reforestation efforts as tree planting has become a popular climate change mitigation strategy across the nation. Therefore, with increased interest and need, it is crucial to identify where varying approaches to support post-fire tree regeneration are most likely to be successful.   This project seeks to help managers target and prioritize various post-fire management approaches and identify the areas where these actions will promote recovery and adaptation or will be less successful due to changing climate conditions. Researchers will quantify how post-fire climate conditions affect both natural and assisted tree regeneration. Then, this information will be used to make a freely available web tool that will predict the probability of post-fire regeneration in recently affected areas for three dominant conifer species: ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, and western larch. This tool will be applied in collaboration with managers from the Bureau of Land Management and The Nature Conservancy to help prioritize planting efforts on a recent wildfire in Montana. This planting effort will provide an opportunity to test if planting seedlings from warmer and drier areas may allow for adaptation to the warming climate conditions. Combined, the work will help managers to effectively use limited resources by prioritizing where and how to plant seedlings and promote forest regeneration after wildfires. 

Natural and cultural resource managers across the country have begun to use a tool known as "scenario planning" to help prepare for climate change effects that may unfold in the future. In this process, scientific projections are used to identify different plausible, relevant, and divergent climate conditions for a particular area, and then through a participatory process, scientists and resource managers develop "scenarios" which describe the implications of these different conditions for resources and management. The North Central CASC has been working with the National Park Service (NPS) Climate Change Response Program (CCRP) to encourage and support national parks in incorporating climate science and scenario planning into their park management and planning processes. These efforts have helped resource managers to better prepare for the uncertainty of how climate will affect their resources and wild lands. To enhance the capacity and scope of these engagements, the North Central CASC brought on two new individuals with expertise and technical skills related to ecological responses to climate. Over the next two years, these individuals will serve as liaisons between the North Central CASC and the NPS CCRP, and as resources in the development and application of climate change scenarios with NPS and other resource management partners. They will help to plan and facilitate scenario planning workshops, synthesize scientific literature on the climate sensitivities of priority resources, develop and apply ecological response models to enhance scenario planning applications, co-produce reports and literature on the outcomes of scenario planning engagements, and evaluate the efficacy of scaling up scenarios from the individual park level to the regional level to broaden their use and applicability for resource managers.