Evidence that climate change is impacting species and ecosystems in the Northeast Region is growing. These impacts pose significant challenges to the future conservation of our fish, wildlife, and habitats requiring managers to improve conservation tools and modify management strategies within a changing climate. The most urgent question that needs to be answered before others can be fully addressed is: which species and habitats are likely to be vulnerable to, or benefit from, the changing climate? A collaborative project, funded in part by a Northeast Regional Conservation Need (RCN) grant, is underway to assess the long-term implications of climate change on the region's fish and wildlife populations, reports the Wildlife Management Institute. The purpose of the Northeast RCN Grant Program is to address critical landscape-scale wildlife conservation needs by combining the resources of numerous wildlife management agencies, leveraging State Wildlife Grant funds, and prioritizing conservation actions identified in State Wildlife Action Plans.

Over the last five years significant progress has been made in assessing the vulnerabilities of organisms and habitats to the changing climate. While the Northeast has pioneered and led much of this vulnerability assessment work, our knowledge is still confined to a few individual states. However, the most effective conservation of many resources will require a regional view to evaluate the vulnerabilities of valued resources, and understand how these vulnerabilities may vary across the region.

In a project extending from Maine to the Virginias, the Northeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (NEAFWA), the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NALCC), Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences (Manomet), and the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) are collaborating with other major northeastern stakeholders to protect fish and wildlife and their habitats from climate change. Specifically, NEAFWA, NALCC, Manomet, and NWF have completed a three-year effort to evaluate the vulnerabilities of the Northeast's key habitats, and to help increase the capabilities of state fish and wildlife agencies to respond to these challenges. This regional effort is the first of its kind in the country, and is an essential step toward the implementation of effective "climate-smart" conservation of ecosystems.

The overarching goal of the NEAFWA/NALCC Regional Habitat Vulnerability Assessment Project (the NEAFWA project) is to provide vulnerability information that will help the northeastern states plan their conservation of fish and wildlife under a changing climate. The NEAFWA project is intended to address important gaps in our knowledge by building and applying an approach to evaluate the vulnerabilities of fish and wildlife habitats within and across all 13 states in the Northeast Region and the District of Columbia.

To date, the NEAFWA project has completed 4 reports:

• The vulnerabilities of fish and wildlife habitats in the northeast to climate change;
• The vulnerabilities of northeastern fish and wildlife habitats to sea level rise;
• Climate change and cold water fish habitat in the northeast, a vulnerability assessment;
• Implementing climate-smart conservation in northeastern upland forests.

The NEAFWA Habitat Vulnerability Assessment Model is now being used by 6 states to complete their state vulnerability assessments. In addition, the model has been used as an important component of training courses for Federal and NGO practitioners in vulnerability assessment.