Since I started my fellowship back in January, our climate profiles have come a long way! In my first blog post, I mentioned that our profiles will focus on how climate hazards like air temperatures, drought, wildfire, riverine flooding, etc. will change on army installations in our region by mid-century. Through a vigorous editing process, our profiles have evolved to establish regional historical climate trends and elaborate on how these projected changes in climate will impact particularly important natural resources at the installation. Going through the process of creating profiles for Region 1 (including OR, WA, ID, HI) and Region 7 (AK) has been extremely rewarding because I feel like a local expert for each unique ecosystem I’ve worked in so far. The development of each climate profile requires a systematic research process where I familiarize myself with the ecoregion local plant and animal species, regional climates, and unique natural landscape features that could be present on the installation. Incorporating climate data for future time periods also allows me to visualize how that particular ecoregion will change in the future, and how biodiversity might respond to these changes. Overall, working on these climate profiles has given me a unique opportunity to understand how interconnected the natural world is, and how sensitive each ecosystem is to even the slightest changes in our environment.

 One of the challenges I still work through daily while creating these profiles is working in ecosystems that are completely unique from what I am used to. Having graduated from the University of Oregon last year, I am extremely comfortable with ecosystem dynamics in the Pacific Northwest, especially west of the Cascade Mountain Range. The opportunity to create profiles for installations in Hawaii and Alaska has been particularly difficult because most climate models that work for the contiguous United States do not work for these states. As a result, I’ve had to do a lot of additional research to find appropriate climate tools and climate data to address future changes at these unique installations. In addition, orographic effects in Hawaii and Alaska play an essential role in shaping the drastic differences in climates across different state regions, resulting in a lack of unanimous climate modeling for the 2050s timeframe.

 While the climate research has been quite tedious, I feel immensely lucky to be working in such amazing ecosystems. Hawaii is a prime example of an area highly vulnerable to climate change, with coastal areas projected to experience extreme sea level rise, high elevation areas experiencing an increased risk of extreme drought and wildfires, and freshwater reserves being at a high risk of contamination. While human populations struggle to adapt to increased health risks and significant infrastructure damage, invasive species are projected to increase their distribution and abundance while the many endemic species are likely to face significant range contractions. In doing this fellowship, my hope is that I am contributing to emphasizing the urgency towards prioritizing conservation in the face of climate change - not only for the sake of generations after us, but for the ecosystems and animals that have to face the consequences of our actions every day. 

As I reflect on being halfway done with my fellowship and all of the work I’ve completed so far, I feel very lucky to be at the forefront of making climate change information more accessible to the public and more accepted in conservation management decisions. I look forward to seeing how our climate profiles continue to develop and how our research will fit into adaptive frameworks for the future of conservation. Thank you for reading :)