NE CASC News

A team lead by NE CASC deputy federal director Olivia LeDee has completed the project "Development of a Wildlife Adaptation Menu for Resource Managers".

Over the past decade, newer technologies such as drones and trail cameras have revolutionized wildlife monitoring, particularly by facilitating multi-species community studies. While this work has great potential to inform conservation planning, a new paper analyzing 92 such projects suggests that their reliability may be undermined by methodological flaws or misapplication of analytical tools.

The federal government has increased its support for the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center (NE CASC), hosted at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, by approximately $1 million over the next year. This additional funding, which supplements the five-year, $4.5 million grant renewal awarded to the center last fall, will advance its mission of developing the knowledge and tools necessary to help fish, wildlife, and ecosystems adapt to the impacts of climate change. 

The NE CASC invites all members of the climate adaptation community to help us assess our communications efforts by participating in a communications survey. Your feedback will play an integral role in guiding the redevelopment of our website and enhancing our expansive collection of other materials, including our newsletter and annual report.

The Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center (NE CASC) is pleased to announce a call for statements of interest regarding Fiscal Year 2020 Research Awards. Please note that the eligibility criteria and submission deadline for statements of interest relevant to the Midwest have recently been revised. Read below for details. 

Available funding for the Northeastern region is $800,000-$1,000,000. Funding for individual projects will not exceed $390,000.

Available funding for the Midwestern region is $3,000,000. Funding for individual projects will not exceed $600,000.

The College of Menominee Nation, an NE CASC consortium institution, recently partnered with the Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science (NIACS) and the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) to host the fourth in a series of Tribal Adaptation Menu Workshops that commenced in early 2019 and will continue throughout 2020. These events have been organized to help Tribal natural resource managers identify priorities, challenges, and areas of concern as they create action plans for adaptation and resilience. 

The Gulf of Maine 2050 International Symposium took place November 4-8 in Portland, Maine. Sponsored by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and its partner organizations, the meeting succeeded in bringing together environmental, economic, social and institutional perspectives on climate resilience in the Gulf of Maine. NE CASC researchers contributed to several aspects of the program, which featured more than 50 presentations, workshops, and panel discussions. 

NE CASC PIs Thomas Bonnot and Frank Thompson have worked with a wide range of partners to complete a new report that facilitates planning for sustainable landscapes. Their publication, Developing a decision-support process for landscape conservation design, accomplishes this goal by integrating dynamic-landscape metapopulation models (DLMPS) and structured decision making (SDM).

NE CASC PI and University of Vermont faculty member Anthony D'Amato collaborated with Paul Catanzaro, a colleague at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, on the recently released publication, Forest Carbon: An Essential Natural Solution for Climate Change. This guide was developed to help woodland owners and managers consider how their forest management strategy affects the carbon within their forest and thus the forest’s ability to mitigate climate change.

Could eliminating “name bias” in consumer seafood selection prove essential both to supporting food sustainability and to boosting the New England fishing industry? Amanda Davis, a NE CASC fellow and University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate student, has assembled a diverse team of UMass collaborators—including representatives from environmental conservation, food science and campus dining services—to investigate this question.

Two members of the NE CASC, principal investigator Chris Caldwell and Midwest Tribal resilience liaison Sara Smith, recently joined a diverse group of collaborators in receiving the 2019 Climate Adaptation Leadership Award from the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies.

The Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center is pleased to announce that a consortium of universities, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been chosen to host the NE CASC for a 5-year cycle!  Following our previous seven successful years, the center is funded until 2024.  We look forward to continuing to provide our expertise to address the region's most pressing climate adaptation challenges for natural and cultural resource managers.