Science THEMES
The Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center (SW CASC) Science Themes for 2025–2030 address key management challenges and research priorities identified by our Advisory Committee between April and October 2024. These themes focus on the most urgent needs across the southwest region, including interconnected issues like drought, wildfire risk, and ecosystem health.
2025-2030
Water Availability and Long-Term Drought
Changing water availability and long-term drought may have cascading impacts across ecosystems and communities.
- Identify and evaluate methods and strategies to reduce the effects of long-term drought and water shortages, including economic evaluation, assessments of community preferences, and community impact analyses.
- Develop and evaluate drought risk assessment tools to support management actions.
- Assess the impacts of fluctuating water levels and changes in water quality on ecosystems, fish, wildlife and public health.
- Evaluate the impacts of climate variability and drought on groundwater resources and groundwater-dependent ecosystems and communities.
- Characterize impacts of changing precipitation types, seasonality, and variability on natural and cultural resources, including identifying species and systems most vulnerable to changing precipitation and novel drought conditions.
- Improve understanding, observations, and estimates of changing precipitation type, seasonality, and variability, including snowpack and runoff measurements.
- Understand groundwater and surface water interactions and their associated impacts on lakes, rivers, streams, and aquatic systems.
Altered Fire Regimes
Shifts in the timing, frequency, size, and impacts of wildfires are challenging existing resource management approaches.
- Advance understanding of how pre- and post-wildfire conditions and treatments influence fire risk, spread, and behavior.
- Evaluate economic and social trade-offs and benefits of proactive versus reactive fire management strategies.
- Identify and evaluate ecosystem and social vulnerabilities to wildfire.
- Determine the interacting effects of changing fuel loads and types, including invasive species spread, on altered fire regimes and ecosystem resilience.
- Identify best practices for fuels reduction treatments, including siting, seasonality, and implementation for fire hazard reduction.
- Evaluate and assess post-wildfire restoration and adaptation approaches and monitoring.
- Assess the impacts of changing fire regimes on natural and cultural resources.
- Evaluate the role of Indigenous fire management practices, prescribed fire, and other management activities in reducing fire risk and increasing resilience, including identifying barriers and opportunities to broaden practices.
- Further investigate how climate variability impacts changing fire regimes, especially in non-forested ecosystems.
Extreme Weather and High-Impact Events
Environmental extreme events, from heat waves, flash drought and algal blooms, to insect outbreaks, flooding, and fire can require rapid response from local and regional resource managers.
- Identify vulnerabilities and evaluate management strategies to prepare for extreme weather and high-impact events.
- Evaluate changing flood regimes and associated impacts, and potential adaptation strategies.
- Assess post-wildfire hazards and strategies for adaptation in burned area emergency response and rehabilitation.
- Assess the climate-related factors contributing to insect and disease outbreaks.
- Analyze the cascading and compounding impacts from extreme weather and high-impact events, and examine opportunities for adaptation.
- Investigate social and economic vulnerabilities to high-impact events.
Invasive Species and Changing Ecosystems
Shifts in vegetation and human responses to climate variability can alter the landscape’s ability to support endemic, high-priority, and at-risk wildlife and plant species.
- Evaluate the efficacy of invasive species management approaches.
- Develop frameworks for decision support in managing species movement and range shifts in response to climate variability.
- Determine and evaluate management best practices for ecosystem and species conservation and restoration, given climate variability.
- Determine the factors contributing to the establishment and spread of non-native species, including invasive species.
- Improve understanding of climate-driven species movements, population dynamics, range shifts, and connectivity.
- Develop and evaluate strategies for ecosystem restoration, including decision guidance for when and how to implement.
- Identify best approaches for habitat suitability modeling under a changing climate.
- Evaluate the efficacy of adaptation frameworks such as Resist, Accept, Direct, including identification of monitoring strategies and protocols.
- Better understand the ecological and social implications of ecosystem change, including better understanding acceptable levels of change.
Changing Coastal Environments
Sea-level rise, increased storm surge, changing ocean temperatures, marine heatwaves, coastal erosion, and loss of wetlands are impacting coastal ecosystems and communities.
- Evaluate sea-level rise projections and uncertainty estimates to inform use in research and decision-making.
- Identify and evaluate adaptation activities to increase resilience to sea-level rise.
- Identify and evaluate opportunities for nature-based solutions to changing coastlines.
- Evaluate the social, cultural, and economic vulnerabilities of coastal regions and practices that constrain or advance adaptive capacity.
- Identify opportunities for coastal habitat adaptation.
- Assess the impacts of climate variability on coastal and nearshore ecosystems.
- Identify and assess regions, species, and habitats at greatest risk of climate-driven coastal hazards, including sea-level rise, flooding, erosion, and storm surge.
- Determine the impacts and extent of ocean acidification on coastal and nearshore ecosystem function.
Monitoring, Management, and Response Opportunities and Obstacles
Evaluating institutional and scientific opportunities and barriers to effective monitoring, management and adaptation.
- Develop and evaluate frameworks for effective risk communication and incorporation into decision-making.
- Develop strategies for assessing the relative value of additional data and/or reduced uncertainty for decision-making.
- Inform the design of effective monitoring programs and early warning systems to detect and respond to climate variability and track the impacts of adaptation strategies.
- Assess the efficacy of climate-informed decision science, scenarios, and frameworks in the selection, application, and siting of restoration, conservation, and nature-based solution management actions.
- Evaluate strategies for identifying and filling data gaps.
- Determine effective practices for adaptation to climate variability and identify ways to detect and reduce the risk of maladaptation.
- Identify strategies for respectfully and equitably including and applying Indigenous and local knowledges into planning, while respecting data sovereignty and the principles of free, prior, and informed consent.
- Assess how climate adaptation choices to protect natural and cultural resources are influenced by perceptions and values of decision makers, interested parties, and rightsholders.
- Identify co-benefits associated with climate adaptation practices.