The conservation community has long discussed the need to develop a tool to assess the effectiveness and utility of adaptation approaches at creating resilient landscapes of natural communities and associated species assemblages under global change impacts. Through collaborations with multiple management partners, this project will develop and evaluate various adaptation approaches. Most notably, the project team will produce a Landscape Health Index (LHI) for the Missouri Department of Conservation, a tool that will assess and monitor the impacts of conservation efforts on the health of species and habitats at broader scales (e.g., at the COA level) amidst global change processes. Investigators are also using assisted migration to re-establish a population of brown-headed nuthatch to a climate-adapted forest communtiy that is being restored in Missouri's Ozarks

Effective migratory bird management and conservation requires an integrate approach at multiple spatial and temporal scales.  We developed a spatially explicit agent-based model for dabbling ducks during spring migration. We are modeling foraging and resting behavior at prominent spring migration stopover sites throughout the midcontinent region.  Emergent properties of the working model include spring migration stopover duration, movement distances and survival.  We used the model to evaluate alternative land-use change and management scenarios to evaluate the effects of environmental variation on dabbling duck spring migration stopover duration and survival. The agent-based model has been developed and is has been evaluated and validated using emergent properties, including stopover duration, survival and movement distances.  We have performed 7 different analyses encompassing approximately 3,000 individual simulations

Recent extreme floods on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers have motivated expansion of floodplain conservation lands. Within Missouri there are more than 85,000 acres of public conservation lands in large-river floodplains. Floodplain lands are highly dynamic and challenging to manage, particularly as future climatic conditions may be highly variable. These lands have the potential to provide valuable ecosystem services like provision of habitat, nutrient processing, carbon sequestration, and flood-water storage that produce economic values in terms of recreational spending, improved water quality, and decreased flood hazards. However, floodplain managers may need tools to help them understand nonstationary conditions on conservation lands. This project worked with floodplain managers to identify the information most needed to understand nonstationary conditions, and to develop tools they can apply to conservation lands to improve decision making