Data to Decisions for Climate Resilience: A Prototype Focused on Salmon in the Yakima River Basin

From 2015 - 2016, Northwest Indian College, the Tulalip Tribes, and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium collaborated in formulating the concepts for a prototype Tribal Lands Collaboratory (TLC). The TLC was used to explore how web-based collaboration technologies can be used to study the impacts of climate change on the tightly linked timings of salmonberry ripening, Swainson's thrush singing, and the return of salmon. In the fall of 2017, Neptune extended the TLC approach by initiating and leading a small experimental effort called "Data to Decisions for Climate Resilience" (D2D). D2D is co-sponsored by the US Global Change Research Program's National Climate Assessment network and the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners. The objectives of D2D included building a set of openly web-accessible concept maps to document climate adaptation planning methods, including a set of methodologies called "Structured Decision Making". To initiate D2D, we studied the challenges of the Yakama Nations' salmon harvests set against a complex landscape of socio-ecological actors in the Yakima River Basin. In this poster, we broadly describe the scope of D2D, which remains an experimental work-in-progress.