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Video presentations from the conference held October 18-19, 2016 at Utah State University. As climate changes, forests are being impacted by severe drought, longer fire seasons, and impressive insect epidemics. New approaches to landscape restoration are needed to cope with these disturbances. The 2016 Restoring the West Conference offered presentations by experts in climate science, landscape restoration, and forest ecology on techniques for this uncertain future, and gave examples where these techniques are working.

This final report uses biological data collected in wadeable rivers and streams, by four states, to examine the components of state and tribal bioassessment and biomonitoring programs that may be vulnerable to climate change. The study investigates the potential to identify biological response signals to climate change within existing bioassessment data sets; analyzes how biological responses can be categorized and interpreted; and assesses how they may influence decision-making processes. The analyses suggest that several biological indicators may be used to detect climate change effects and such indicators can be used by state bioassessment programs to document changes at high-quality reference sites.

This final report discusses the development of a database of freshwater biological traits. The database combines several existing traits databases into an online format. The database is also augmented with additional traits that are relevant to detecting climate change-related effects, especially traits related to temperature tolerances and flow.

Bagdon, B. and Huang, C.H., 2016. Southwest Fire Science Consortium Working Paper

by Yasmeen Najmi, Sterling Groghan, Dr. Cliff Crawford. June 2005. Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, Albuquerque, NM

Article discusses some of the impacts of climate change on tribes.

Unprecedented study relies on more than 1,500 years of tree-ring data and hundreds of years of fire-scar records gathered from Ponderosa Pine forests.

Unprecedented study relies on more than 1,500 years of tree-ring data and hundreds of years of fire-scar records gathered from Ponderosa Pine forests

EPA Web Report #4482. 2013. This report presents 1) current information on the impacts from wildfires on drinking water utilities and 2) lessons learned and recommendations for future research that were discussed during the Wildfire Readiness and Response Workshop held in Denver, Colo. April 4-5, 2013.

Top-down regional climate patterns result in high spatial fire synchrony among Southwest forests. At landscape scales, however bottom-up (topography) patterns are also important in determining fire history and tree age structure variability. The distinct fire histories from these two study areas provided natural age structure experiments that indicated tree age cohorts occurred during periods of reduced fire frequencies. In some instances these periods were likely caused by climatic variability creating synchronous age cohorts across the region. At other times, extended fire intervals were a function of local topography. Overall, these studies demonstrated that landscape and climatic variations combine to produce complex spatial and temporal variations in fire history and tree age structures.