Automating Custom Climate Reports to Support Natural Resource Management in the Southwest

Natural resource managers often use weather and climate information to make land management decisions. While technological advancements in data acquisition and processing have led to more online, climate-based tools and databases, these tools often require resource managers to invest a substantial amount of time to use.  

To address these data access challenges, the project team was previously funded to collaborate with resource managers to design highly specialized, customizable climate reports that can be used to improve land management and decision making. A key finding of this previous research was that the data and time requirements of report generation were unique to each partner. Because of that, a codebase was developed for each partner that fetches climate information to generate unique climate reports specific to their decision needs.  

This project will expand on previous research by engaging two new types of land managers, wildfire and tribal. This will allow the project team to further compare information needs and reporting requirements across different areas and agencies, and to further develop and refine the partner codebase. Engaging new partners will help build a more robust collaborative framework while improving land management activities, decision making, and climate adaptation planning across multiple natural resource sectors.