IV. Future Adaptation Strategies?

An original figure below summarizes the impacts of precipitation pattern changes on Pacific Northwest. In summary, the future projections of climate change is intensification of seasonal variability and the trickle-down effects that follow as consequences.

Original figure illustrates an overview of climate change impacts on PNW forest ecosystems.

Are we just going to sit and watch the climate change bring all the disasters? No, the climatologists have already been proposing updated adaptation strategies in response to the warming. According to dnr.wa.gov, some strategies involve educating scientists and universities about adaptation information, using integrated monitoring program to determine areas that need most changes in management actions, and incorporating climate change adaptations, like ecological interactions, species genetics, and migration pathways, in all relevant agency programs for information accuracy and consistency.

Other adaptation strategies that are more hands-on management of forests could be changing landscape structure to promote habitat connectivity and facilitate species to migrate away from possible forest fires, predation, and pathogens -- increasing landscape used as critical habitats and resilient ecosystem types, suppressing wild fires in critical habitats that require conservation or use wild fires to establish climate-adapted communities, and introducing new genotypes to improve resilience and diversity of forest communities. These are just few of various adaptation strategies being implemented on national forest parks and conservation projects, in hopes to mitigate climate change consequences. Further research on improving various adaptation strategies and prioritizing the PNW forests as critical conservation value would be most important at this point; both for preserving biodiversity and maintaining Pacific Northwest region's socioeconomic benefits from the forests' ecological services .