After the 2012 National Forest System Planning Rule directed the USDA Forest Service to begin considering climate change in their land management plans, Forest Service personnel turned to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Explorer tool to get projections of future climate conditions. This tool from the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit provides climate projections for every county in the contiguous United States.

Working with developers of the open-source Climate Explorer, employees from the Forest Service Southern Region, Southern Research Station, and the USDA Southeast Climate Hub requested a new version of the tool, called Climate By Forest, to access projection data by ecoregion within National Forest System (NFS) lands.

Using the first version of Climate By Forest, forest planners could obtain climate change graphs and data files with just a few clicks. However, they still had to perform statistical analyses on the data to test whether projected changes would lead to a significant departure from historical conditions. This step required days to weeks of a climate specialist’s time to find, process, and reformat data files. To resolve this, developers incorporated the relevant statistical methods into the tool, enabling managers for every unit in the lower 48 states to access projections and the relevant statistical documentation for their plans from Climate By Forest in a matter of minutes. This development process is described in more detail here.

This StoryMap includes instructions on how to use the tool, an embedded version of the Climate By Forest tool, a guide to the ecoregions used in the tool, and a description of the climate variables used. More information about the data used in this tool can be found on the Climate Explorer About and FAQ pages. A printable version of this StoryMap is also available.