Defenders in Action: Advancing Science for Wildlife

Good science lies at the heart of understanding how climate change will impact species and ecosystems, and how best to respond. Defenders experts work closely with climate change scientists around the country to ensure we have the best and most up-to-date data available to be able to battle climate change most effectively.

National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center

The amount of uncertainty about how plants and animals will respond to a warming world is one of the biggest challenges in conservation. The U.S. Geological Survey’s National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center was championed by Defenders and formed by Congress in 2008 to meet this challenge by providing natural resource managers with the information they respond to climate change.  

Landscape Conservation Cooperatives

Threats to the conservation of wildlife and ecosystems are increasingly large-scale and complex.  Combined with decreasing financial and staffing resources, there is a need to work more effectively and efficiently across jurisdictional boundaries. Landscape Conservation Cooperatives ( LCC) led by the Department of the Interior are helping natural resource management agencies improve landscape-level coordination of conservation efforts and provide science and technical capacity to tackle today’s complex environmental problems. Defenders is working to make this initiative successful.