Get reliable science

Student teams participating in our climate change vulnerability assessment took a variety of different analytical approaches to assess potential impacts of climate change on sagebrush steppe ecosystems. While teams using species distribution models found evidence for fairly dramatic changes in sagebrush distributions, teams using other approaches, ranging from mechanistic recruitment models to paleoecological data, tended to project more modest impacts of climate change. The apparent inconsistencies in these results reflect the different assumptions and objectives of the different analyses. Nevertheless, the complexity of the approaches and the diversity of the projections poses challenges in communicating the results to managers. We draw two conclusions from our experience. First, while projections of species distribution models offer valuable information, they should not form the sole basis of vulnerability assessments. Second, to increase confidence in our projections, we need new research to integrate results from a variety of models. I will describe a new approach our team is now pursuing to compare predictions from a series of correlative and mechanistic models.