Facilitating climate‐change‐induced range shifts across continental land‐use barriers

Abstract

Climate changes impose requirements for many species to shift their ranges to remain within environmentally tolerable areas, but near-continuous regions of intense human land use stretching across continental extents diminish dispersal prospects for many species. We reviewed the impact of habitat loss and fragmentation on species' abilities to track changing climates and existing plans to facilitate species dispersal in response to climate change through regions of intensive land uses, drawing on examples from North America and elsewhere. We identified an emerging analytical framework that accounts for variation in species' dispersal capacities relative to both the pace of climate change and habitat availability. Habitat loss and fragmentation hinder climate change tracking, particularly for specialists, by impeding both propagule dispersal and population growth. This framework can be used to identify prospective modern-era climatic refugia, where the pace of climate change has been slower than surrounding areas, that are defined relative to individual species' needs. The framework also underscores the importance of identifying and managing dispersal pathways or corridors through semi-continental land use barriers that can benefit many species simultaneously. These emerging strategies to facilitate range shifts must account for uncertainties around population adaptation to local environmental conditions. Accounting for uncertainties in climate change and dispersal capabilities among species and expanding biological monitoring programs within an adaptive management paradigm are vital strategies that will improve species' capacities to track rapidly shifting climatic conditions across landscapes dominated by intensive human land use.

Informing Canada’s commitment to biodiversity conservation: A science-based framework to help guide protected areas designation through Target 1 and beyond

“…The fourth principle, connectivity, promotes natural movements for wide-ranging species (see Di Minin et al 2016), prevents breeding populations from becoming isolated (Haddad et al 2015;Belote et al 2016), and facilitates south-to-north and elevational movement of individuals that are shifting geographically in response to changing climates Robillard et al 2015). Long-term experiments have shown that fragmentation of landscapes reduces biodiversity by 13%-75%, lowering species' abundance and persistence times (Haddad et al 2015, Coristine et al…”

“…Climatically stable areas ("climate refugia") foster the persistence of biological communities (Iwamura et al 2010) and facilitate population movement from current to future suitable habitat (Robillard et al 2015;Coristine et al 2016;McGuire et al 2016). …”

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“…For eButterfly, project design is based on the formation of scientific questions, followed by the recruitment of participants to collect the data necessary to answer those questions. eButterfly focuses on scientific inquiry in changes in biodiversity, effects of climate change, and butterfly conservation from regional to continental scales [14,28,29]. Specifically, we are interested in how climate and land use change alters butterfly distributions, abundances, phenologies, and community structure in space and time.…”

Refugial debate: on small sites according to their function and capacity

“…In this context, and according to the island biogeography theory (MacArthur and Wilson 1967), we can consider microrefugia (or perfugia) as patches of suitable habitats which may or may not be inhabited by relict populations at a certain period. The occupation of suitable sites which can play a role in species range shift depends in a meaningful way on the dispersal effectiveness (Robillard et al 2015); hence, some sets of suitable sites can only play a potential role. As mentioned above, in regions where general conditions are projected to became unsuitable for the analyzed taxa, it is only possible to model potential, locallysuitable sites (e.g.…”