Regional Short- and Long-term Climate Impacts on Northern Rocky Mountain and Great Plains Ecosystems
With joint funding from the North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) and NASA's Earth Science Applied Sciences Program, the NC CSC supports resource managers and their decision process through its Resource for Vulnerability Assessment, Adaptation and Mitigation Planning (ReVAMP), a collaborative research/planning effort supported by high performance computing and modeling resources. The NC CSC focuses primarily on climate data as input to the ReVAMP. In this project the NASA DEVELOP program was used to evaluate how remote sensing data sets can contribute to the ecological response models that are implemented in the ReVAMP system. This work demonstrates the utility of remote sensing in vulnerability assessment and ensures remote sensing data sets are fully embedded in the ReVAMP system. The use of remote sensing products helped to scale ground-based measurement collected on managed lands to larger regions more suitable for analysis against climate modeling grids. The NASA DEVELOP program covered the cost of six graduate students and the NC CSC covered 3 months of time dedicated to faculty advisors for the DEVELOP students.