The United States Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is tasked with managing over 248 million acres (>1 million km2) of public lands for multiple, often conflicting, uses. Climate change will affect the sustainability of many of these land uses and could further increase conflicts between them. Although natural resource managers are concerned about climate change, many are unable to adequately incorporate climate change into their adaptation strategies or management plans. Due to institutional constraints and limited resources, natural resource managers are not always aware of and/or do not always employ the most current scientific knowledge. To help address these gaps, we first conducted a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature that discussed potential impacts of climate change on the multiple land uses the BLM manages in the Intermountain West (USA). Second, we further expanded these results with a synthesis of projected vegetation changes across the Intermountain West. Finally, we also conducted a content analysis of BLM Resource Management Plans in order to determine how climate change is explicitly addressed by BLM managers, and whether such plans reflect changes predicted by the scientific literature. We found that active resource use generally threatens intrinsic values such as conservation and ecosystem services on BLM land, and climate change is expected to exacerbate these threats in numerous ways. Additionally, our synthesis of vegetation modeling suggests substantial changes in vegetation due to climate change. However, BLM management plans rarely referred to climate change explicitly and did not reflect the results of the literature review or vegetation modeling. Our results suggest there is a disconnect between BLM land management and the best available science on climate change. We recommend that the BLM actively integrate the best available science into on-the-ground management plans and activities and that researchers studying the effects of climate change make a more robust effort to understand the practices and policies of public land management in order to communicate their findings effectively.

Included on this page are the data and code used to complete our analyses. Specifically, there is a PDF of code and instructions for extracting bibliometric data from Scopus bibtex files, an excel spreadsheet detailing articles that discuss land use and climate change, a Word file explaining this spreadsheet, a zip file of all BLM Resource Management Plans that we analyzed, the NVivo file of our plan analysis, and a folder of code and data used to analyze vegetation models.