USFWS - Big Expansion of Global Warming Centers

The biggest immediate need is to beef up the agency's scientific capacity, a long-neglected area, Hamilton said. "We really need to make more informed decisions about how we're spending our money and where we're doing our habitat restoration. But to do that, we have to have some pretty solid science to back it up," he said. A hallmark of that effort, tied to the Interior Department's broader climate strategy, is an initial $25 million investment this year to set up nine "landscape conservation cooperatives," in which federal, state and outside researchers will collaborate to tackle regional climate questions. Eventually, the goal is to support a total of 18 centers, Hamilton said. With each focused on particular representative species, the centers could help feed FWS information it needs to make climate-oriented decisions and predictions. To do this, scientists face a daunting task of wedding global climate data to regional models specific to a habitat or wildlife population...read more