Climate Change Impacts in Virginia: Status of Natural Resource Data Records as Tools to Assess Continuing Trends

As scientists we pose the hypothesis that climate change over the past decades has left a signal in natural resource status and productivity in Virginia. This signal exists subsumed in a variety of data from crop and forestry production, to fishery landings, to spatial distribution of numerous plant and animal species of interest. Description of these signals in concert with known changes in climate descriptors (temperature, rainfall and more) provide a basis for hind-casting possible cause and effect relationships. If such relationships exist, and we hypothesize that they do, then projections of climate descriptors (temperature, rainfall and more) provide the basis for projections of impacts on defined natural resources, with obvious economic and societal impacts. Before a comprehensive analysis of extant data can occur we must start with a simple inventory of available data. As simplistic as this may sound we can find no single database that describes the general status of natural resources in Virginia over the past decades. Indeed, we suggest that the majority of such data exists as unpublished (in peer review, and in some instances even technical reports) compilations spread among the various state and federal natural resource agencies active in Virginia. This body of work had several goals; 1) to assess the scope of natural resource descriptive data available in the Commonwealth of Virginia, 2) to assemble an index of such data, and 3) develop a bibliography to serve as a resource for more comprehensive analyses in the future