title: Scale-dependent complementarity of climatic velocity and environmental diversity for identifying priority areas for conservation under climate change.
abstract: As most regions of the earth transition to altered climatic conditions, new methods are needed to identify refugia and other areas whose conservation would facilitate persistence of biodiversity under climate change. We compared several common approaches to conservation planning focused on climate resilience over a broad range of ecological settings across North America and evaluated how commonalities in the priority areas identified by different methods varied with regional context and spatial scale. Our results indicate that priority areas based on different environmental diversity metrics differed substantially from each other and from priorities based on spatiotemporal metrics such as climatic velocity. Refugia identified by diversity or velocity metrics were not strongly associated with the current protected area system, suggesting the need for additional conservation measures including protection of refugia. Despite the inherent uncertainties in predicting future climate, we found that variation among climatic velocities derived from different general circulation models and emissions pathways was less than the variation among the suite of environmental diversity metrics. To address uncertainty created by this variation, planners can combine priorities identified by alternative metrics at a single resolution and downweight areas of high variation between metrics. Alternately, coarse-resolution velocity metrics can be combined with fine-resolution diversity metrics in order to leverage the respective strengths of the two groups of metrics as tools for identification of potential macro- and microrefugia that in combination maximize both transient and long-term resilience to climate change. Planners should compare and integrate approaches that span a range of model complexity and spatial scale to match the range of ecological and physical processes influencing persistence of biodiversity and identify a conservation network resilient to threats operating at multiple scales.
authors.affiliation: Klamath Center for Conservation Research, Orleans, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Carlos
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-7697-8721
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Carroll
authors.affiliation: Department of Biometry and Environmental System Analysis, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
authors.forename: David R
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-3437-2422
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Roberts
authors.affiliation: School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
authors.forename: Julia L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Michalak
authors.affiliation: School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
authors.forename: Joshua J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Lawler
authors.affiliation: Renewable Resources Department, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
authors.forename: Scott E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Nielsen
authors.affiliation: Renewable Resources Department, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
authors.forename: Diana
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Stralberg
authors.affiliation: Renewable Resources Department, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hamann
authors.affiliation: The Nature Conservancy, Fort Collins, CO, USA.
authors.forename: Brad H
authors.initials: BH
authors.lastname: Mcrae
authors.affiliation: Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
authors.forename: Tongli
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D057231:Climate Change; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000379:methods; D004463:Ecology; D005544:Forecasting; D009656:North America; D000068236:Refugium
keywords: climate change adaptation; climatic velocity; conservation planning; environmental diversity; land facets; protected areas; refugia