The northeastern U.S. is highly exposed to climate change; in fact, the rate of change is higher than most places on earth (Karmalkar and Bradley 2017). The forests of the Northeast CASC region, and the wildlife that inhabit them, are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.  In particular, the boreal forests, a biome that reaches from Alaska to the Northeast, and the northern hardwoods, including sugar maple and paper birch, are expected to be intolerant of climate warming. Likewise, many of the birds, mammals, amphibians, fish, and insects that inhabit these forest ecosystems are at their southern range edges here and are considered sensitive to climate change. Furthermore, local species’ adaptive capacity is limited by habitat fragmentation, high rates of invasive species, and other stressors. There is considerable uncertainty with respect to the magnitude and direction of future changes, particularly with respect to interactions with changes in land use and land management, as well as novel interactions amongst co-occurring species. Thus, a focus on climate adaptation in northern forest ecosystems, including evaluations of the impacts of particular actions, is critical. 

Coldwater stream habitats are at risk from climate change, but management actions, such as removing barriers to passage and restoring riparian forest canopies, can in some cases help to ameliorate negative impacts.  Our overall goal is to devise and implement decision-support tools to help managers make climate-appropriate management choices.  We are currently working on several different approaches to this problem.  First, we are working to improve stream temperature predictions and incorporate stream thermal resilience into models for prioritizing barrier removal.  Second, we are using remotely-sensed data on riparian forest cover in combination with temperature vulnerability models to help managers target appropriate areas for riparian restoration.  To make the results of both of these efforts readily available to the management community, we have developed a website which incorporates these and other decision-support tools