Climate Impacts Group

With ever-shrinking pristine habitats across the region and globe, wildlife is often hard-pressed to find a place to call home. Even if they find a suitable home today, the question remains if it will still be suitable tomorrow. With climate change already underway and increasing human presence in wild landscapes, land managers and conservation organizations continually wrestle with this issue here in the Pacific Northwest and across the world.

These complexities make conservation planning difficult, but the Cascadia Partner Forum is an organization primed to tackle it. Its focus is on Cascadia, an area rich in both plant and animal diversity that encompasses much of Washington and southern British Columbia. The Forum is an outlet where many entities, big and small, can pool their best thinking to coordinate approaches to conservation.

Andrew Shirk, research scientist with the Climate Impacts Group, is featured in this story from the UW College of the Environment. Shirk discusses the Cascadia Partner Forum and the work he is leading to develop a map-based tool to inform conservation efforts.