This course will introduce students with: 1) the basic concept of climate change and its impacts on forest ecosystems; 2) the principles of climatic and ecological models; 3) skills and techniques to use climatic models and to build ecological models; and 4) methods of incorporating model predictions in developing forest adaptive strategies to adapt to climate change.
By the end of this course students should be able to:
Explain climate change and its impact on forest ecosystems at global and local scales;
Use the scale-free climate model ClimateNA (for north America) and ClimateAP (for Asia Pacific) to generate climate data for specific locations and geographic areas (climate maps);
Build ecological niche model and generate spatial model predictions;
Interpret and incorporate models’ output in developing strategies for conservation, adaptation and management under a changing climate.