As species’ geographic ranges and ecosystem functions are altered in response to climate change, there is a need to integrate biodiversity conservation approaches that promote natural adaptation into land use planning. Successful conservation will need to embrace multiple climate adaptation approaches, but to date they have not been conveyed in an integrated way to help support immediate conservation planning and action in the face of inherent spatial uncertainty about future conditions. Instead, these multiple approaches are often conveyed as competing or contradictory alternatives, when in fact, they are complementary. We present a framework that synthesizes six promising spatially explicit adaptation approaches for conserving biodiversity. We provide guidance on implementing these adaptation approaches and include case studies that highlight how biodiversity conservation can be used in planning. We conclude with general guidance on choosing appropriate climate adaptation approaches to amend for conservation planning.
Collaborative and community-based approaches to conservation and natural resource management often utilize maps that designate particular areas as being high priorities for conservation. These maps are used in stakeholder workshops and/or public discourse, but have often been highly contentious and counterproductive. We propose that quantifying and visualizing some of the uncertainty involved in making such maps could decrease their potential for causing conflict, thereby facilitating discourse and eventually, conservation action. We propose that an extra bonus could be attained by mapping the effects of missing or sparse input data regarding landowner ‘‘willingness to conserve’’ (given fair market compensation). The primary contributions of this action research are in the development of the propositions and in their implementation using a stochastic approach (Monte Carlo simulation). Preliminary assessment of the propositions occurred, but further research is needed to more formally evaluate them. Some practical suggestions and additional research considerations are provided.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to manage and expand statutory conservation areas (i.e., parks and formally protected areas). Therefore, alternative opportunities for land conservation merit closer attention. This paper examines the extent to which privately owned conservation areas contribute to biodiversity representation. Gap analyses were performed for a large semi-arid region in South Africa with a comprehensive database of private conservation areas. The distribution of private conservation areas was compared to statutory conservation areas using several landscape characteristics: biome and vegetation variant, elevation class, ecological process area, total area, and threat status (endangerment). Conservation target achievement for the vegetation variants was also assessed, as was the degree to which private conservation areas complemented statutory conservation areas by representing different landscape characteristics. The number of targets achieved nearly tripled if private conservation areas were considered in addition to statutory conservation areas. Further, private conservation areas signi?cantly complemented statutory conservation areas in the types of biomes, elevation classes, and threat status classes conserved. Private conservation areas were especially important in conserving lower elevation habitat, and by association, endangered vegetation. This particular relationship is expected to be common worldwide. Our results indicate that private lands conservation deserves an increased allocation of resources for both research and implementation.
Aim: To investigate the velocity of species-specific exposure to climate change for mid- and late 21st century and develop metrics that quantify exposure to climate change over space and time.
Location: California Floristic Province, south-western USA.
Methods: Occurrences from presence/absence inventories of eight Californian endemic tree species (Pinus balfouriana [Grev.&Balf.], Pinus coulteri [D.Don], Pinus muricata [D.Don.], Pinus sabiniana [D.Don], Quercus douglasii [Hook.&Arn.], Quercus engelmannii [Greene], Quercus lobata [Nee] and Quercus wislizeni [A.DC.]) were used to develop eight species distribution models (SDMs) for each species with the BIOMOD platform, and this ensemble was used to construct current suitability maps and future projections based on two global circulation models in two time periods [mid-century: 2041–2070 and late century (LC): 2071–2100]. From the resulting current and future suitability maps, we calculated a bioclimatic velocity as the ratio of temporal gradient to spatial gradient. We developed and compared eight metrics of temporal exposure to climate change for mid- and LC for each species.
Results: The velocity of species exposure to climate change varies across species and time periods, even for similarly distributed species. Weak support among the species analyzed for higher velocities in exposure to climate change towards the end of the 21st century, coinciding with harsher conditions. The variation in the pace of exposure was greater among species than for climate projections considered.
Main conclusions: The pace of climate change exposure varies depending on period of analysis, species and the spatial extent of conservation decisions (potential ranges versus current distributions). Translating physical climatic space into a biotic climatic space helps informing conservation decisions in a given time frame. However, the influence of spatial and temporal resolution on modeled species distributions needs further consideration in order to better characterize the dynamics of exposure and species-specific velocities.
Large shifts in species ranges have been predicted under future climate scenarios based primarily on niche-based species distribution models. However, the mechanisms that would cause such shifts are uncertain. Natural and anthropogenic fires have shaped the distributions of many plant species, but their effects have seldom been included in future projections of species ranges. Here, we examine how the combination of climate and fire influence historical and future distributions of the ponderosa pine–prairie ecotone at the edge of the Black Hills in South Dakota, USA, as simulated by MC1, a dynamic global vegetation model that includes the effects of fire, climate, and atmospheric CO2 concentration on vegetation dynamics. For this purpose, we parameterized MC1 for ponderosa pine in the Black Hills, designating the revised model as MC1-WCNP. Results show that fire frequency, as affected by humidity and temperature, is central to the simulation of historical prairies in the warmer lowlands versus woodlands in the cooler, moister highlands. Based on three downscaled general circulation model climate projections for the 21st century, we simulate greater frequencies of natural fire throughout the area due to substantial warming and, for two of the climate projections, lower relative humidity. However, established ponderosa pine forests are relatively fire resistant, and areas that were initially wooded remained so over the 21st century for most of our future climate x fire management scenarios. This result contrasts with projections for ponderosa pine based on climatic niches, which suggest that its suitable habitat in the Black Hills will be greatly diminished by the middle of the 21st century. We hypothesize that the differences between the future predictions from these two approaches are due in part to the inclusion of fire effects in MC1, and we highlight the importance of accounting for fire as managed by humans in assessing both historical species distributions and future climate change effects.
Conservation managers and policy makers require models that can rank the impacts of multiple, interacting threats on biodiversity so that actions can be prioritized. An integrated modeling framework was used to predict the viability of plant populations for five species in southern California’s Mediterranean type ecosystem. The framework integrates forecasts of land-use change from an urban growth model with projections of future climatically-suitable habitat from climate and species distribution models, which are linked to a stochastic population model. The population model incorporates the effects of disturbance regimes and management actions on population viability. This framework: (1) ranks threats by their relative and cumulative impacts on population viability, such as land-use change, climate change, altered disturbance regimes or invasive species, and (2) ranks management responses in terms of their effectiveness for land protection, assisted dispersal, fire management and invasive species control. Toofrequent fire was often the top threat for the species studied, thus fire reduction was ranked the most important management option. Projected changes in suitable habitat as a result of climate change were generally large, but varied across species and climate scenarios; urban development could exacerbate loss of suitable habitat.
James Strittholt and Mike White have published a chapter in Making Transparent Environmental Management Decisions: Applications of the Ecosystem Management Decision Support System called Forest Conservation Planning.
The Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system has been used around the world to support environmental analysis and planning in many different application areas, and it has been applied over a wide range of geographic scales, from forest stands to entire countries. An extensive sampling of this diversity of applications is presented in section 2, in which EMDS application developers describe the varied uses of the system. These accounts, together with the requisite background in section 1, provide valuable practical insights into how the system can be applied in the general domain of environmental management.Part II contains nine chapters that describe use of the system in specific application areas. In general, each chapter provides some background on the application domain, motivations for using EMDS in this context, a brief review of other EMDS applications in the domain, if applicable, a fuller discussion of a specific application, and aspects of analyses that worked well and didn’t work well.
White and Stritholt (‘‘Forest Conservation Planning’’) describe an EMDS application for spatially explicit conservation planning in forested landscapes. Its application is illustrated in two case studies: a conservation assessment of 1.5 million acres of the northern California Sierra Nevada region that was used to prioritize and expand land protection, and an 18 million acre conservation value assessment of the Alberta Foothills region that was used in multiuse forest planning. These case studies demonstrate how EMDS can be used to model diverse and complex landscape characteristics, using information about mixed precision, to inform conservation decision making across large regions.
We developed a process that links the mechanistic power of dynamic global vegetation models with the detailed vegetation dynamics of state-and-transition models to project local vegetation shifts driven by projected climate change. We applied our approach to central Oregon (USA) ecosystems using three climate change scenarios to assess potential future changes in species composition and community structure. Our results suggest that: (1) legacy effects incorporated in state-and-transition models realistically dampen climate change effects on vegetation; (2) species-specific response to fire built into state-and-transition models can result in increased resistance to climate change, as was the case for ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests, or increased sensitivity to climate change, as was the case for some shrublands and grasslands in the study area; and (3) vegetation could remain relatively stable in the short term, then shift rapidly as a consequence of increased disturbance such as wildfire and altered environmental conditions. Managers and other land stewards can use results from our linked models to better anticipate potential climate-induced shifts in local vegetation and resulting effects on wildlife habitat.
Biodiversity conservation, in an era of global change and scarce funding, benefits from approaches that simultaneously solve multiple problems. Here, we discuss conservation management of the island scrub-jay (Aphelocoma insularis), the only island-endemic passerine species in the continental United States, which is currently restricted to 250-square-kilometer Santa Cruz Island, California. Although the species is not listed as threatened by state or federal agencies, its viability is nonetheless threatened on multiple fronts. We discuss management actions that could reduce extinction risk, including vaccination, captive propagation, biosecurity measures, and establishing a second free-living population on a neighboring island. Establishing a second population on Santa Rosa Island may have the added benefit of accelerating the restoration and enhancing the resilience of that island’s currently highly degraded ecosystem. The proactive management framework for island scrub-jays presented here illustrates how strategies for species protection, ecosystem restoration, and adaptation to and mitigation of climate change can converge into an integrated solution.
Despite the scarcity of sustained funding to promote continuous record collection, scientists and citizens around the world are now generating large volumes of monitoring data that vary in quality, format, supporting documentation, and accessibility. Complex interactions between climate, fauna, flora, and human land use challenge the understanding and forecasting of the mechanisms of change. Diverse models are now being run at various spatial and temporal scales to understand past climate variability and its impacts, generate future climate and land use scenarios, and project potential future impacts to the planet’s inhabitants. Estimates of the uncertainty associated with past observations and climate proxies, and with the results from climate and climate impacts models are often discussed but rarely quantified in a useful way to help land emissions, land use (agriculture, urbanization, industrialization, energy resource acquisition), and conservation efforts. Conservation practitioners and land managers are struggling to synthesize the wealth of available information and heed warnings of the unpredictable human response to edge and information, and translate evolving science results into on-the-ground climate-aware strategies. Many agencies and NGOs are currently involved in synthesizing observations and simulations, developing land management strategies, and implementing those they judge are most likely to succeed or at least cause the least harm. Collaboration and effective information sharing is essential to work effectively towards common goals. This paper includes examples of source of climate change information, a brief summary of the types of models currently used in climate change science projects, and illustrations of collaborative efforts that address climate change issues specifically focused on the Gyrfalcon in panarctic regions.