I applaud Luc and Christine in their efforts to approach identifying critical climate change indicators utilizing the PSR method. Christine's first draft of the matrix seen through teh "PSR lens" was an excellent beginning. Here are some comments for further discussion.

The PSR allocations as noted in Luc's paper lead me to believe that for ESIP purposes we should concentrate on the "State" part of the approach since in my understanding that's where the indictaors show themselves. In the draft matrix Christine has placed a number of climate change indicators in the "State" column and I agree with most of them. However I believe that the items such as yield of grapes should still be placed in that column and not seen as a terrestrial ecosystem response. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a good indicator.

I see the "response" column as the ultimate management policies driven by the indicators and as such may not be appropriate for ESIP consideration in any documentation such as Tides of Change.

I like the delineation of "Climate System", "terrestrial ecosystem", etc. since it may lend itself to incorporating ideas such as watershed management. It also puts those indicators such as temperature change in an appropriate place, i.e. we should not be asking decision makers to respond to temperature change as an indicator, we should be providing them with the indicators evident in the ecosystem.

And finally, I see "pressures" from the "human system" (as Luc defines it) to include increased infrastructure and coastal development. To properly identify an increase in vulnerability of human systems to climate change, we need to identify the continued building of infrastructure that has not been made resilient from knowledge of climate change as an added pressure. A proper "response" could be to develop a policy to not build withing 100m of the shoreline. But, once again, ESIP's role is to identify the appropriate indicator that could be used to define that management policy.

That's all for now.

I had computer trouble this
morning and didn't get it resolved until now, so figure it is not very
helpful to join the call 5 minutes before it ends. Sorry about that.
I did look at the indicator list, and agree that erosion rates (in a
few places) would be informative since they integrate storm intensity
(wind, rain, wave, and current energy) and location. It might also be
helpful to also think of integrative indicators for precipitation, such
as run-off or river flow to supplement atmospheric precip measures.
Marilyn ten Brink