AdaptWest: a new spatial database to support landscape planning for climate resilience

Land use planning processes increasingly focus on ensuring that management activities are consistent with maintaining resilience and conserving biodiversity under changing climates. Achieving this goal requires comprehensive spatial information at an extent and resolution relevant to planners. AdaptWest (adaptwest.databasin.org) is a new spatial database that combines broad geographic extent, relatively high spatial resolution, and a wide range of spatial data relevant to resilience and adaptation potential of natural systems under climate change. But such diverse data is of limited use without a context for comparison and synthesis. In order to integrate diverse perspectives on what areas are important for climate adaptation, a comprehensive planning process should compare priority areas from different approaches, test assumptions (such as the value of coarse filter targets as surrogates for biodiversity), encompass a range of model complexity, and ultimately use a multi-track approach to produce a unified analysis of priority areas. This presentation will describe the types of data available on the AdaptWest website as well as broader insights about promising approaches for developing and communicating climate resilience information.