Overview

The NPLCC is one of 22 LCCs established by the Department of Interior. The North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperative is a self-directed partnership between federal agencies, states, Tribes/First Nations, non-governmental organizations, universities, and other entities to collaboratively define science needs and jointly address broad-scale conservation issues, such as climate change.

The NPLCC combines the collective science capacity, infrastructure, creativity, perspectives, and sometimes, financial resources of existing partnerships and programs to address decision support needs on a comprehensive scale. It is a forum for developing a common understanding of change driven by climate and related stressors and its success depends on active engagement of partners throughout the region.

The North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperative promotes development, coordination, and dissemination of science to inform landscape level conservation and sustainable resource management in the face of a changing climate and related stressors.

NPLCC Goals

• Maximize the ability of partners to make informed decisions with respect to conservation and sustainable resource management or priority natural and cultural resources subject to climate change and related large-scale stressors in the NPLCC region.
• Identify an address trans-boundary landscape-level natural and cultural resource information needs that the LCC is uniquely qualified to address – including the identification of opportunities for (and barriers to) landscape-level conservation/sustainable resource management.
• Identify priorities for applied science and other information for conservation/sustainable resource management. Coordinate efforts with the relevant Climate Science Centers and other research entities to help inform research priorities.
• Promote identification, use, and sharing of science, traditional knowledge and other relevant information to support conservation/sustainable resource management, and adaptive management decisions.
• Maximize the availability and accessibility of data and information about large-scale stressors and their impacts on natural and cultural resources, and about conservation/sustainable resource management approaches and effectiveness.
• Promote coordination and efficiency of efforts among resource managers and science entities that are addressing science, traditional knowledge and other relevant information to achieve landscape level conservation/sustainable resource management.
• Promote awareness and understanding of NPLCC and its products for landscape-level conservation and the effects of climate change on ecosystems, resources, cultures and economies.

NPLCC Strategy for Science and Traditional Knowledge, 2013-2016 (adopted November 2012 by the Steering Committee)

Guiding Principles

• Focus on helping managers understand the availability and effectiveness of adaptation and mitigation response actions
• Focus on facilitating coordination, collaboration, and capacity building, and on developing or assisting with tools to assist decision-makers
• Identify and promote opportunities to use TEK to inform partner and stakeholder decisions
• Promote and facilitate consideration of the connections and interactions between ecosystems

Priority Topics 

• Effects of hydrologic regime shifts on rivers, streams, and riparian corridors
• Effects of change in air temperature and precipitation on Forests
• Effects of changes in sea levels and storms on marine shorelines, the nearshore and estuaries
• Effects of the changes in the hydrologic regime on anadromous fish
• Invasive species, diseases, pests and their effects on biological communities