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Campbell, Patrick: I oversee the Inventory and Monitoring Program for the National Capital Region of the National Park Service. This includes 11 NPS units in MD, VA, WV and DC.

Lee, Brian: Dr. Lee applies geospatially based analyses and visualization to community decision-making processes for land use planning primarily at the watershed/landscape scale in his research and his teaching. He is also interested in understanding how to connect people to decisions made at the site scale to water quality and watershed processes.

McNamee, Julie: Air Resource Division contact in the NPS Washington office. Also expertise in GHG accounting, facilitating meetings, planning Climate Friendly Parks workshops, working across NPS directorates.

Schulz, Cindy

Karriker, Kent: Kent Karriker is the Ecosystems Group Leader for the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. He supervises the program managers for wildlife, fisheries, botany, non-native invasive species, hydrology, soils, air, and GIS.

Sanders-Reed, Carol: web portal administrator

Richter, Stephen: Population genetics; land-use; amphibian evolutionary ecology; conservation; wetland ecology; management

Obama Administration dedicates nearly $10 million to help tribes prepare for climate change: As part of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan and continued commitment to support Native American leaders in building strong, resilient communities, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Kevin Washburn today announced the Administration has dedicated nearly $10 million this year to help tribes prepare for climate change through adaptation and mitigation.

Department of the Interior’s Activities Generate $360 Billion in Annual Economic Activity, Support 2 Million Jobs, New Report Reveals: Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell capped off a weeklong series of events discussing the President’s vision for full, permanent funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund by releasing a report today showing that the various activities of the Department of the Interior contributed $360 billion to the U.S. economy in 2013, supporting more than 2 million jobs in communities across the country.

Ecosystem Services and Threats Assessment: Knowing which ecosystem services are provided and who benefits from these services will allow resource managers, scientists, industries, and the public to explore new institutional, market, and policies to encourage protection of and investments in these resources. Objectives of this project are to 1) link the environmental and economic values of the region’s natural assets in a way that establishes a common language for resource managers, scientists, industry, local government and the public to substantively engage in landscape-level conservation planning and 2) to explore different development or management strategies and examine trade-offs to support improved and informed decision-making. A first step in determining the cumulative effects of stressors on Appalachian ecosystem integrity, functionality, and endemic or trust species, is having access to and appreciation of existing knowledge and data. A comprehensive status assessment will be conducted of pre-existing or ongoing work that could contribute to better understanding of individual or cumulative impacts, and further design of a landscape-scale assessment of environmental threats for the Appalachian LCC-defined landscape. The assessment will: (1) summarize existing threat assessment efforts of major stressors—including measures of ecosystems integrity, function, or sustainability, and identification of endemic species or trust species, (2) identify knowledge gaps and/or limitations to existing tools, methodology, and approaches, and (3) through a critical analysis and consultation based on expert-opinion, identify a framework and propose a process to facilitate the AppLCC systematically moving forward on a comprehensive threats assessment.

Ecosystem Services and Environmental Threats Scope of Work: The "Assessment and Inventory of Ecosystem Services and Environmental Threats" research project will deliver an inventory of existing ecosystem services assessments, products, and decision-support or visualization tools conducted within the Appalachian LCC boundary. The inventory will document and assess the classification, methodology used, describe priority ecosystem services and how they were identified, and provide economic valuations if available. Research will also involve a regional survey and workshops within our boundary to assemble a list of high priority economic goods and services and non‐monetized values and benefits that are dependent on Appalachia’s natural assets while identifying the associated resource that support these services and benefits (such as intact forests, clean rivers, etc.). Finally a geo‐referenced assessment of the location of key ecosystem services that are linked to specific priority economic products or uses will be developed. This will include assembling datasets and generating visualization-base maps that depict relevant natural assets and identify locations of key products and issues. This information would then be used to produce a spatial interpretation of areas within Appalachia that serve critical social and environmental functions, as well as identify those that are highly vulnerable to losses associated with key ecosystem stressors.