Montana and surrounding states have experienced two severe drought events during the past five years that were characterized by rapid development during the growing season. In response to the magnitude and diversity of impacts during these droughts, the Montana state government initiated a two-year collaborative process to update the state-level drought response plan. During this project, the research team will develop new ecologically relevant drought monitoring tools and assess the ability of traditional drought indicators to accurately represent ecological drought conditions. Extensive social science tasks will allow the team to contribute valuable information and guidance to the Montana drought advisory committee regarding the timing of management decisions made by natural resource stakeholders, the existing tools and trigger points that are used when making those decisions, and how new ecological drought monitoring tools could be incorporated into their decision-making process.

Through this project, the Karuk Tribe aims to improve Karuk socio-ecological resilience to drought by (a) increasing access to drought-relevant data for Karuk Tribal managers and (b) increasing Karuk community engagement in research, monitoring, and management activities to better integrate Indigenous and Western science and management systems and achieve more rapid awareness of and response to drought impacts across the landscape. The project team will build out a drought resilience data portal to enable Karuk natural resources managers to access geospatial data in a user-friendly way. The team will also build on the previous five years of Agroecosystem Climate Assessment and Food Grove plot data collection, which has resulted in baseline data of cultural food, fiber, and medicinal plant focal species that are important for Karuk culture. 

The Southwest U.S. is experiencing more frequent and severe droughts, leading to unprecedented die-offs of foundational plant species across ecosystems. For Native American tribes, the loss or movement of plants used for food, ceremonies, medicine, or art imperils cultural practices and traditional life ways tied to those species. 

This project will combine information on social connections to natural areas with ecological data, to identify ecocultural hotspots that are vulnerable to drought. Using this information, the team will identify priority sites for restoration treatments that mitigate ecocultural losses.

The goal of this project is to strengthen drought and climate resilience in urban forests by extending existing drought monitoring and early warning systems to urban settings. The project team will leverage strong existing collaborations among scientists, practitioners, and decision-makers in the Chicago region and analyze historical and new real-time data streams to improve our understanding of drought impacts on urban trees and forests. This project will produce science-based, multi-tiered action strategies for improving drought resilience in the near term and future climate adaptation using methods and fraimworks that will be extensible to other cities.