Arizona Cooperative Extension

University of Arizona Cooperative Extension and the National Weather Service (NWS) in Tucson have developed a working group focused on engaging the agricultural community of Southeast Arizona. The working group is assessing information needs, providing training opportunities and technical support, as well as conducting applied research and developing new and enhanced decision support tools. Main activities have included several training and needs assessment workshops, the development and maintenance of a listserv with more than 40 subscribers, and the development of new NWS forecast information visualizations and interfaces focused on frost and freezing events.

Cooperative Extension (CE) has over 100-years of experience in delivering science-based decision support to clientele from multiple sectors. The CE structure enables a high level of connectedness and awareness of local issues and provides opportunities to assess local and multi-sector climate service needs. We are working through CE offices to capture snapshots of local climate science and service needs across rural areas of AZ and NM. Since CE agents in these states work closely with both private land owners/producers (e.g. ranchers and farmers) and state/federal natural resource managers, we will be able to assess both the needs and interconnections between private and public resource managers, consistent with the ‘nested matrix’ concept of assessing climate change impacts and responses at multiple scales.

The Southwest Climate Outlook (SWCO) sum­marizes climate and weather information from disparate sources in nonscientific language, providing more than 1,500 people with timely climate-related information. Since SWCO's inception in 2002, stemming from the END InSight project, the publication has evolved into a tool for two-way communication with stakeholders and a platform for responding to needs throughout the region. The SWCO audience is very diverse, including people in the water sector, farmers, ranchers, research scientists, and interested citizens, among others.

Wildfire Alternatives (WALTER), is a multifaceted University of Arizona initiative designed to facilitate strategic planning for wildland fire management. The primary goal of WALTER is to improve understanding of how interactions among climate, fuels, fire history, and human factors influence fire risk, and to devise innovative ways to deliver information derived from this understanding to fire managers and community members concerned about strategic planning for wildland fire risk. The project focused on four study areas: the Catalina-Rincon, Huachuca, Chiricahua, and Jemez mountains.

Data were collected from a wide range of sources and transformed into GIS databases and map layers. Field research was conducted to ground-truth remotely sensed data on fuel moisture levels. A survey was conducted to ascertain the perceptions of local residents in the four study areas regarding fire risk in their area. These data were digitized into one of the layers of the model. Techniques based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) were incorporated to enable users to weight the GIS layers themselves as part of the process of producing maps of fire risk. User input was solicited throughout the project and formal user evaluations of the GIS decision support tool, Fire-Climate-Society Version 1 (FCS-1), were conducted once the model was completed. Comments, information, and recommendations from stakeholder participants were incorporated into the design process.

Ranching is a culturally, historically, ecologically, and politically important livelihood in the Southwest. With more than two-thirds of the land area in Arizona classified as rangeland, any change in the ability of ranchers to continue their range activities could have considerable implications for the rate and direction of land use change, the balance of ecological and economic resource needs, the pace of urban development, and trends in water consumption and conservation.

To understand how ranching is impacted by climate variability and change, this research: a) compiles a profile of Arizona’s ranchers, with an emphasis on socioeconomic characteristics in the southeastern portion of the state; b) identifies the physical, social, and political-economic factors that make the livelihoods of ranchers vulnerable to climatic variability; and c) determines whether or not ranchers can mitigate their vulnerability with improved access to information on climate.