Session Overview: Climate and Landscape Change Over Time

In this chapter, we strive for something different. Whereas a goal of the other sessions at the Sierra Nevada Science Symposium was to present new research on familiar themes, our goal in the session “Climate and Landscape Change Over Time” was to introduce a topic that itself is likely unfamiliar to many resource scientists and managers. The limited discourse to date between the fields of climatology and resource ecology is surprising for two reasons. First, in the past two decades, there has been a revolution in research on climatology that has led to dramatic new understanding about the functioning and dynamics of the climate system. Second, these new insights are relevant to the resource sciences—so much so that fuller understanding in our research community could restructure thinking about how ecological systems work and revolutionize strategies for resource management and conservation.