The Iberian lynx (Lynxpardinus) has suffered severe population declines in the twentieth century and is now on the brink of extinction 1 . Climate change could further threaten the survival of the species 2 , but its forecast effects are being neglected in recovery plans 3,4 . Quantitative estimates of extinction risk under climate change have so far mostly relied on inferences from correlative projections of species' habitat shifts 5 . Here we use ecological niche models coupled to metapopulation simulations with source-sink dynamics 6,7 to directly investigate the combined effects of climate change, prey availability and management intervention on the persistence of the Iberian lynx. Our approach is unique in that it explicitly models dynamic bi-trophic species interactions in a climate change setting. We show that anticipated climate change will rapidly and severely decrease lynx abundance and probably lead to its extinction in the wild within 50 years, even with strong global efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. In stark contrast, we also show that a carefully planned reintroduction programme, accounting for the effects of climate change, prey abundance and habitat connectivity, could avert extinction of the lynx this century. Our results demonstrate, for the first time, why considering prey availability, climate change and their interaction in models is important when designing policies to prevent future biodiversity loss.The 9 Rui Nabeiro Biodiversity Chair, CIBIO, University of Évora, Évora, 7000, Portugal, 10 Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, University of Copenhagen, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark. *e-mail: maraujo@mncn.csic.es towards increasing the carrying capacity of reintroduction sites through habitat restoration, relocating rabbits and limiting direct anthropogenic-related fatalities 4,13 .Although a well-financed effort to avert the extinction of this charismatic species is underway (> e94 million funding since 1994) 4 , non-accounted threats, such asclimatechangeanditsinfluenceonpreyabundance,arenotbeing considered in recovery plans.Here we provide the most comprehensive analysis of the likely effects of climate change yet for a threatened vertebrate. So far, models used to investigate how climate change will
Summary1. The boreal biome, representing approximately one third of remaining global forests, provides a number of crucial ecosystem services. A particular challenge in forest ecosystems is to reconcile demand for increased timber production with provisioning of other ecosystem services and biodiversity. However, there is still little knowledge about how forest management could help solve this challenge. Hence, studies that investigate how to manage forests to reduce trade-offs between ecosystem services and biodiversity are urgently needed to help forest owners and policy-makers take informed decisions.2. We applied seven alternative forest management regimes using a forest growth simulator in a large boreal forest production landscape. First, we estimated the potential of the landscape to provide harvest revenues, store carbon and maintain biodiversity across a 50-year time period. Then, we applied multiobjective optimization to identify trade-offs between these three objectives, and to identify the optimal combination of forest management regimes to achieve these objectives.3. It was not possible to achieve high levels of either carbon storage or biodiversity if the objective of forest management was to maximize timber harvest revenues. Moreover, conflicts between biodiversity and carbon storage became stronger when simultaneously targeting high levels of timber revenues. However, with small reductions of timber revenues it was possible to greatly increase the multifunctionality of the landscape, especially the biodiversity indicators.4. Forest management actions, alternative to business-as-usual management, such as reducing thinnings, extending the rotation period and increasing the amount of area set-aside from forestry may be necessary to safeguard biodiversity and non-timber ecosystem services in Fennoscandia. Synthesis and applications.Our results show that no forest management regime alone is able to maximize timber revenues, carbon storage and biodiversity individually or simultaneously, and that a combination of different regimes is needed to resolve the conflicts among these objectives. We conclude that it is possible to reduce the trade-offs between different objectives by applying diversified forest management planning at the boreal landscape-level and that we need to give up the all-encompassing objective of very intensive timber production, which is prevailing particularly in Fennoscandian countries.
Human well-being highly depends on ecosystem services and this dependence is expected to increase in the future with an increasing population and economic growth. Studies that investigate trade-offs between ecosystem services are urgently needed for informing policy-makers. We examine the trade-offs between a provisioning (revenues from timber selling) and regulating (carbon storage and sequestration) ecosystem services among seven alternative forest management regimes in a large boreal forest production landscape. First, we estimate the potential of the landscape to produce harvest revenues and store/sequester carbon across a 50-year time period. Then, we identify conflicts between harvest revenues and carbon storage and sequestration. Finally, we apply multiobjective optimization to find optimal combinations of forest management regimes that maximize harvest revenues and carbon storage/sequestration. Our results show that no management regime alone is able to either maximize harvest revenues or carbon services and that a combination of different regimes is always necessary. We also show that with a relatively little economic investment (5% decrease in harvest revenues), a substantial increase in carbon services could be attained (9% for carbon storage; 15-23% for carbon sequestration). We conclude that it is possible to achieve win-win situations applying diversified forest management planning at a landscape level.
Although climate is known to be one of the key factors determining animal species distributions amongst others, projections of global change impacts on their distributions often rely on bioclimatic envelope models. Vegetation structure and landscape configuration are also key determinants of distributions, but they are rarely considered in such assessments. We explore the consequences of using simulated vegetation structure and composition as well as its associated landscape configuration in models projecting global change effects on Iberian bird species distributions. Both present-day and future distributions were modelled for 168 bird species using two ensemble forecasting methods: Random Forests (RF) and Boosted Regression Trees (BRT). For each species, several models were created, differing in the predictor variables used (climate, vegetation, and landscape configuration). Discrimination ability of each model in the present-day was then tested with four commonly used evaluation methods (AUC, TSS, specificity and sensitivity). The different sets of predictor variables yielded similar spatial patterns for well-modelled species, but the future projections diverged for poorly-modelled species. Models using all predictor variables were not significantly better than models fitted with climate variables alone for ca. 50% of the cases. Moreover, models fitted with climate data were always better than models fitted with landscape configuration variables, and vegetation variables were found to correlate with bird species distributions in 26–40% of the cases with BRT, and in 1–18% of the cases with RF. We conclude that improvements from including vegetation and its landscape configuration variables in comparison with climate only variables might not always be as great as expected for future projections of Iberian bird species.
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