Climate Services for Climate-Adapted Stream Restoration
Sarah LeRoy1*
1University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA; sary21@arizona.edu
Climate change is dramatically impacting temperatures and precipitation patterns around the globe with cascading impacts on many natural resource processes. The flow regimes of streams of dryland regions are being particularly impacted. For practitioners working to restore stream conditions, the impacts of climate change on stream processes can reduce the effectiveness of restoration tactics and make restoration objectives more difficult (if not impossible) to achieve. Therefore, to improve likelihood for success and long-term viability of stream restoration efforts, practitioners need to develop climate-adapted restoration responses that are based on a sound understanding of what climate change means in the region where the stream restoration effort is taking place. To accomplish this, practitioners need rigorous climate data and information, such as projections of temperature and precipitation for their study region, and an understanding of how to interpret the data. Today, there are many agencies and organizations involved in gathering, analyzing, and distributing climatic data, projections, and information to the public and decision-makers. These groups are referred to as climate services, and in recent years the number of these groups has increased dramatically. In this presentation, I will review climate services in the U.S. and northern Mexico, and also discuss other sources of climate data and information that are available to assist stream practitioners in developing effective climate-adapted restoration responses.