Crafting Ecological Scenarios to Implement the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) Framework

As climate change progresses, profound environmental changes are becoming a widespread concern. A new management paradigm is developing to address this concern with a framework that encourages strategic decisions to resist, accept, or direct ecological trajectories. Effective use of the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework requires the scientific community to describe the range of plausible ecological conditions managers might face, while recognizing limits to our ability to predict precisely where or how specific climatic changes may unfold or how complex environmental systems will respond - the climatic future does not fully determine the ecological one.



Recent advances have improved development and delivery of climate futures (summaries of climate conditions for each climate model projection), but approaches for creating and working with a range of ecological scenarios for each climate future do not yet exist. This project will develop potential approaches for crafting ecological scenarios, i.e., storylines designed to capture the range of plausible ecological responses to climate change. Researcher propose to synthesize and compare typical approaches for estimating ecological responses to climate change, consider extensions that allow for multiple ecological community or biome types under each climatic scenario, and develop approaches for “winnowing” a large set of plausible ecological scenarios into a workable, representative set.