PREFACE 
This report was prepared by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) and the Global 
Change Research Program in the National Center for Environmental Assessment (NCEA) of the 
Office of Research and Development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA). 
It is intended for managers and scientists working with aquatic invasive species (AIS) to provide 
them with information on the potential effects of climate change on AIS and strategies for 
adapting their management to accommodate these environmental changes and to highlight 
further research needs and gaps. As a part of the information gathering for this report, U.S. EPA 
convened two workshops with managers and scientists. The first workshop, held at the ELI 
offices in Washington, DC in June 2006, focused on the current state of scientific understanding 
of climate-change effects on AIS and on identifying research needs and gaps. The conclusions 
from the first workshop led to two additional activities: (1) a review of state and regional AIS 
management plans to identify adaptive capacity (i.e., their ability to adjust in response to climate 
change) and (2) a second workshop to plan a series of review papers that addresses the 
connections between climate change and invasive species and the resulting complexity. The 
results from the review of management plans are a significant part of this report and serve as a 
guide for how states and regional councils may begin to incorporate climate change information 
into their planned activities for AIS management. The papers developed as a result of the second 
workshop, also held at ELI in October 2006, will be published as a Special Section in the journal 
Conservation Biology , expected June 2008. 
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