Integration of conservation efforts across geographic, biological, and administrative boundaries is a major movement in natural-resource management. This style of management and problem-solving is increasingly relevant, because drivers of change such as climate shifts, fire, and invasive species increasingly transcend these multidimensional boundaries and pervade conservation efforts on individual sites. Although the benefits of broad-scale conservation are compelling, it represents a complex challenge, owing to uncertainties in scaling up information and concepts as well as in coordination that addresses a more-diverse set of issues, governance structures, and partners. I and other researchers sought to explore the particular successes and challenges of established broad-scale conservation programs, to provide direction for future research towards a larger goal of enhancing effectiveness of broad-scale conservation (e.g., the LCC system).
Large, severe wildfires are a fact of life in southwestern ponderosa pine forests. What will burned ecosystems look like over the coming decades under warming climate? Do management treatments make a lasting difference or will climate override their effects? We applied the relatively new feature of the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) called Climate-FVS, which modifies the widely used FVS model to make it simulate effects of climate change. The short answer: climate change has major effects on our test site, the Rodeo-Chediski fire on Arizona’s Mogollon Rim. At the severe end of the climate scale, forests are nearly eliminated. But under more moderate climate change scenarios, management intervention makes a big difference. The strengths and weaknesses of building climate change into forest modeling are important to understand for making informed decisions.