Integrated marine protected area climate tools: a resource for effective communication of climate information to marine ecosystem managers

Assessment of climate change impact necessitates extracting relevant climate change signals from the climate record and relating them correctly to complex ecosystem responses. Without a comprehensive understanding of the scale, rate, magnitude and behavior of the changes in both environment and ecosystem, it is difficult to quantify a comparison between a changing climate and attributed impacts. Unfortunately, because a large proportion of publically accessible climate change information exists at global or regional scales, many ecosystem managers must plan and make decisions based upon climate information at scales too coarse to adequately connect climate variations to ecosystem impacts that may vary over a few hundred kilometers. This paper addresses the steps taken to develop a suite of climate information products that more directly connect the sub-regional climate and the marine ecosystem at the scale of a marine protected area. The resulting products are designed to give a resource manager ready access to climate information tailored to their planning and decision-making needs.