Climate‐change adaptation focuses on conducting and translating research to minimize the dire impacts of anthropogenic climate change, including threats to biodiversity and human welfare. One adaptation strategy is to focus conservation on climate‐change refugia (that is, areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change over time that enable persistence of valued physical, ecological, and sociocultural resources). In this Special Issue, recent methodological and conceptual advances in refugia science will be highlighted. Advances in this emerging subdiscipline are improving scientific understanding and conservation in the face of climate change by considering scale and ecosystem dynamics, and looking beyond climate exposure to sensitivity and adaptive capacity. We propose considering refugia in the context of a multifaceted, long‐term, network‐based approach, as temporal and spatial gradients of ecological persistence that can act as “slow lanes” rather than areas of stasis. After years of discussion confined primarily to the scientific literature, researchers and resource managers are now working together to put refugia conservation into practice.

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. K E Y W O R D Sclimate change adaptation, climatic velocity, conservation planning, environmental diversity, land facets, protected areas, refugia --

Increasing connectivity is an important strategy for facilitating species range shifts and maintaining biodiversity in the face of climate change. To date, however, few researchers have included future climate projections in efforts to prioritize areas for increasing connectivity. We identified key areas likely to facilitate climate-induced species' movement across western North America. Using historical climate data sets and future climate projections, we mapped potential species' movement routes that link current climate conditions to analogous climate conditions in the future (i.e., future climate analogs) with a novel moving-window analysis based on electrical circuit theory. In addition to tracing shifting climates, the approach accounted for landscape permeability and empirically derived species' dispersal capabilities. We compared connectivity maps generated with our climate-change-informed approach with maps of connectivity based solely on the degree of human modification of the landscape. Including future climate projections in connectivity models substantially shifted and constrained priority areas for movement to a smaller proportion of the landscape than when climate projections were not considered. Potential movement, measured as current flow, decreased in all ecoregions when climate projections were included, particularly when dispersal was limited, which made climate analogs inaccessible. Many areas emerged as important for connectivity only when climate change was modeled in 2 time steps rather than in a single time step. Our results illustrate that movement routes needed to track changing climatic conditions may differ from those that connect present-day landscapes. Incorporating future climate projections into connectivity modeling is an important step toward facilitating successful species movement and population persistence in a changing climate.

Climate‐change refugia – locations likely to facilitate species persistence under climate change – are increasingly important components of conservation planning. Recent approaches for identifying refugia at broad scales include identifying regions that are projected to experience less severe changes (climatic exposure), that contain a diversity of physical and topographic features (environmental diversity), and that either retain or remain close to suitable climatic conditions (climate tracking, including both “species‐neutral” and species‐based approaches). We compared the degree of agreement between these approaches – with respect to their spatial coverage and other characteristics – across much of North America. This analysis found that approaches based on environmental diversity and species‐neutral climatic gradients both favored topographically complex regions, whereas climatic exposure and species‐based approaches identified regions with a range of topographic characteristics. Species‐based approaches targeting specific habitat groups identified unique regions missed by other approaches, emphasizing the importance of asking the question “refugia for what?” when prioritizing refugia. Our results highlight the necessity of including climatic exposure and species‐based information in addition to topographic diversity and climatic gradients in refugia analyses.

As evidenced by past climatic refugia, locations projected to harbor remnants of present-day climates may serve as critical refugia for current biodiversity in the face of modern climate change. We mapped potential climatic refugia in the future across North America, defined as locations with increasingly rare climatic conditions. We identified these locations by tracking projected changes in the size and distribution of climate analogs over time. We used biologically derived thresholds to define analogs and tested the impacts of dispersal limitation with 4 distances to limit analog searches. We identified at most 12% of North America as potential climatic refugia. Refugia extent varied depending on the analog threshold, dispersal distance, and climate projection. However, in all cases refugia were concentrated at high elevations and in topographically complex regions. Refugia identified using different climate projections were largely nested, suggesting that identified refugia were relatively robust to climate-projection selection. Existing conservation areas cover approximately 10% of North America and yet protected up to 25% of identified refugia, indicating that protected areas disproportionately include refugia. Refugia located at lower latitudes (≤40°N) and slightly lower elevations (approximately 2500 m) were more likely to be unprotected. Based on our results, a 23% expansion of the protected-area network would be sufficient to protect the refugia present under all 3 climate projections we explored. We believe these refugia are high conservation priorities due to their potential to harbor rare species in the future. However, these locations are simultaneously highly vulnerable to climate change over the long term. These refugia contracted substantially between the 2050s and the 2080s, which supports the idea that the pace of climate change will strongly determine the availability and effectiveness of refugia for protecting today's biodiversity.

Many species are already responding to global climate change by shifting their ranges to track suitable climatic conditions. However, habitat loss and fragmentation, coupled with the rapidity of climate change, make it difficult for species to keep pace. It is therefore unsurprising that enhancing landscape connectivity is the most frequently cited climate‐adaptation strategy for conserving biodiversity. Yet most connectivity planning, even if intended to address climate change, does not directly take climate change and climate‐driven range shifts into account. Nonetheless, several approaches that do explicitly address the unique challenges posed by climate change have recently emerged. We review these connectivity modeling approaches: specifically, how they incorporate species' responses, identify movement routes, and address uncertainties. Despite this proliferation of approaches, conceptual and analytical hurdles remain, and meeting these challenges will be critical to achieving effective landscape connectivity for species in the face of climate change.

Expanding the network of protected areas is a core strategy for conserving biodiversity in the face of climate change. Here, we explore the impacts on reserve network cost and configuration associated with planning for climate change in the USA using networks that prioritize areas projected to be climatically suitable for 1460 species both today and into the future, climatic refugia and areas likely to facilitate climate-driven species movements. For 14% of the species, networks of sites selected solely to protect areas currently climatically suitable failed to provide climatically suitable habitat in the future. Protecting sites climatically suitable for species today and in the future significantly changed the distribution of priority sites across the USA—increasing relative protection in the northeast, northwest and central USA. Protecting areas projected to retain their climatic suitability for species cost 59% more than solely protecting currently suitable areas. Including all climatic refugia and 20% of areas that facilitate climate-driven movements increased the cost by another 18%. Our results indicate that protecting some types of climatic refugia may be a relatively inexpensive adaptation strategy. Moreover, although addressing climate change in conservation plans will have significant implications for the configuration of networks, the increased cost of doing so may be relatively modest. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Climate change and ecosystems: threats, opportunities and solutions’.

Addressing uncertainties in climate vulnerability remains a challenge for conservation planning. We evaluate how confidence in conservation recommendations may change with agreement among alternative climate projections and metrics of climate exposure. We assessed agreement among three multivariate estimates of climate exposure (forward velocity, backward velocity, and climate dissimilarity) using 18 alternative climate projections for the contiguous United States. For each metric, we classified maps into quartiles for each alternative climate projections, and calculated the frequency of quartiles assigned for each gridded location (high quartile frequency = more agreement among climate projections). We evaluated recommendations using a recent climate adaptation heuristic framework that recommends emphasizing various conservation strategies to land based on current conservation value and expected climate exposure. We found that areas where conservation strategies would be confidently assigned based on high agreement among climate projections varied substantially across regions. In general, there was more agreement in forward and backward velocity estimates among alternative projections than agreement in estimates of local dissimilarity. Consensus of climate predictions resulted in the same conservation recommendation assignments in a few areas, but patterns varied by climate exposure metric. This work demonstrates an approach for explicitly evaluating alternative predictions in geographic patterns of climate change.