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

We worked with stakeholders to develop a series of climate change adaptation management strategies for forests in the Central Hardwoods and Gulf Coastal Plains and Ozarks region. Strategies focused on resistance, resilience, or transition of forests under climate change and vary the types of silvicultural practices considered and where and how much each practice occurs. We implemented strategies in a forest landscape-modeling framework and demonstrated the consequences of these alternative strategies on forest composition and structure in the region. The goal was to provide a large-scale perspective on the potential of forest adaptation strategies to address impacts of climate change on forests

We used a Bayesian hierarchical modeling framework to evaluate land cover and climate relationships with abundance of avian species with varying habitat requirements across the Midwestern U.S. based on North American Breeding Bird Survey data.  We then linked these models to landscape change and climate models to evaluate potential long-term impacts on birds and evaluate proposed conservation activities to mitigate negative impacts associated with climate change. This research predicted large scale patterns in bird abundance for conservation planning

We are investigating the effects of climate on multiple aspects of bird demography, including nest success, per nest productivity, juvenile survival, adult survival, and species viability.  We are using a long term data set on bird nesting success and new and existing data on juvenile and adult survival to discover climate effects on productivity and we are developing modeling approaches to predict regional species viability. This work discovers direct and indirect effects of climate on bird demographics to infom vulnerability assessments and conservation planning. We are actively working with the Gulf Coast Plains and Ozarks LCC and the Central Hardwoods All Bird Joint Venture to ensure our results are useful for conservation planning in the region. Our results will be used to guide climate adaptation planning and management across the region