From a vulnerability assessment toward regionally-coordinated, use-inspired science: Chugach National Forest and the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center

Abstract:

In 2013, the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center began working with Chugach National Forest on providing climate impacts information for the Chugach Vulnerability Assessment. The assessment was intended to provide some of the necessary scientific input for the Chugach Forest Plan, and partially addressed potential impacts on snow-dependent sensitivities of seasonal hydrology, anadromous fish, and recreation. Future projections of snowpack metrics including snowfall water equivalent and the fraction of snow precipitation available for warm season streamflow did not exist, but were cooperatively developed and allowed assessment of potential salmon vulnerabilities and reliability of cool season recreation. The assessment was just the beginning, however, with further collaboration on US Forest Service and US National Park Service publications including a regional drought synthesis for southcentral Alaska and derivative products and application to similar watersheds for Alaska National Park Service lands. The scientific products have also contributed, along with other future climate projections, to collaborative efforts and community impacts assessments with other stakeholders including US Fish and Wildlife Service and Alaska Native communities. In all these applications, deliberate co-production was not the original objective, and the science-management partnerships could be characterized more as collaboration, with agency and community partners articulating needs that could be in part met with such products and researchers working with managers to characterize the application and uncertainties for the use intended. The original elements of this success were simple – we weren’t aiming for a coproduction test case, only trying to meet a need for information with dialogue and an effort to tailor available science, even if imperfect. Perhaps minimal success is defined as increased trust and capacity, with a greater premium on actual use of information in decision making in addition to planning; if that is the case, we have developed a foundation from which such success is more likely to occur than it was.