Ecological impacts of climate change and variability on Western landscapes are often investigated in isolation, despite the fact that these impacts affect water quality, quantity, ecosystem services, and management of human water infrastructure. For example, the impacts of mountain pine beetle on water supplies are not fully understood, but are presumed to increase runoff and nutrient delivery to watersheds in the short-term. Research areas in need of cross-sector integration include climate change impacts to forests, fires, pests, invasive species (quagga and zebra mussels, especially), and the ripple effects of these impacts to ecosystem and economic services, energy production, water quality, quality, and management. Public lands feature prominently in these impacts and include national parks, national forests, BLM land, as well as state holdings. We are especially interested in the critical ecosystem and economic services provided by public lands. Federal agencies (including BLM) are now required to include climate change in their planning, providing a large opportunity. There is both an emerging need for this research and methods to implement and apply the science in planning strategies. This theme has a significant nexus with the new demand for climate information by federal agencies such as USFWS. This is a fundamentally new theme for WWA. It is being driven by the knowledge that ecosystems provide significant services to humans, are understudied, and changes have the potential to significantly impact humans.

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