Conservation of future boreal forest bird communities considering lags in vegetation response to climate change: a modified refugia approach

Abstract

Aim Species and ecosystems may be unable to keep pace with rapid climate change projected for the 21st century. We evaluated an underexplored dimension of the mismatch between climate and biota: limitations to forest growth and succession affecting habitat suitability. Our objective was to inform continental-scale conservation for boreal songbirds under disequilibria between climate, vegetation and fauna.Location Boreal and southern arctic ecoregions of North America.Methods We used forest inventory and avian survey data to classify 53 species by seral-stage affinity and applied these to generate alternative projections of changes in species' core habitat distributions based on different vegetation lagtime assumptions. We used our seral stage-modified refugia approach and the Zonation algorithm to identify multispecies boreal conservation priorities over the 21st century. We evaluated the sensitivity of land rankings to seral-stage affinity and species' weights and assessed the conservation value of the existing protected areas network compared to Zonation results.Results End-of-century projected changes in songbird distribution were reduced by up to 169% when vegetation lags were considered. Zonation land rankings based on unconstrained climate projections were concentrated at high latitudes, whereas those based on strict and modified refugia scenarios were concentrated in coastal and high-elevation areas, as well as biome transition zones, which were fairly consistent over time and species weights. The existing protected areas network covering 14% of the study area was estimated to conserve 12-14% of baseline avian biodiversity across time periods and scenarios, compared to 16-25% for top-ranked Zonation areas.Main conclusions For some boreal songbirds, limits to forest growth and succession may result in dramatic reductions in suitable habitat over the next century. Our seral stage-adjusted approach provides conservative and efficient boreal conservation priorities anchored around climatic macrorefugia that are robust to century-long climate change and complement the current protected areas network.

Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of EVI and Its Response to Climatic Factors in Recent 16 years Based on Grey Relational Analysis in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China

“…As a comprehensive indicator, vegetation reflects the changes of the ecological environment, and studying its response to climate change has become one of the main contents of the current global change research [4][5][6]. The enhanced vegetation index (EVI) is an important quantitative index, reflecting the growth status of the surface vegetation and is also one of the most important basic data in ecosystems research.…”

Climate policy action needed to reduce vulnerability of conservation‐reliant grassland birds in North America

“…Inclusion of vegetation and land‐use covariates may also be sources of error. First, vegetation projections were not mechanistic and therefore do not reflect the dynamics of plant range expansion and contraction, likely overestimating future range gains and under‐estimating vulnerability (Stralberg et al, ). Furthermore, vegetation projections were based on CMIP3 climate projections, which differ from the CMIP5 projections used for climate covariates.…”

“…The fact that the vegetation classifications were consensus projections across multiple GCMs and emissions scenarios may result in under‐estimation of vegetation change under the 3°C increase scenario and over‐estimating vegetation change under the 1.5°C increase scenario. The challenge of finding vegetation projections at broad spatial scales lead many to exclude vegetation from distribution projections (Langham et al, ; Lawler et al, ; Stralberg et al, ), to use general assumptions about vegetation lag‐times (Stralberg, Bayne, et al, ), or to work with regional projections (Matthews, Iverson, Prasad, & Peters, ). We opted to include vegetation despite the limitations of available data.…”

There goes the neighborhood: White-crowned Sparrow nest site selection and reproductive success as local density declines

“…Distributional modeling using occurrence or abundance data has been widely adopted as a way of predicting wildlife responses to future environmental change (Seoane et al 2004, 2015). Most of these models have been built independently of demographic mechanisms that can drive distributional shifts.…”