Wildlife resistance and protection in a changing New England landscape

Abstract

Rapid changes in climate and land use threaten the persistence of wildlife species. Understanding where species are likely to occur now and in the future can help identify areas that are resistant to change over time and guide conservation planning. We estimated changes in species distribution patterns and spatial resistance in five future scenarios for the New England region of the northeastern United States. We present scenario-specific distribution change maps for nine harvested wildlife species, identifying regions of increasing, decreasing, or stable habitat suitability within each scenario. Next, we isolated areas where species occurrence probability is high (p > 0.7) and resistant to change across all future scenarios. Resistance was also evaluated relative to current land protection to identify patterns in and out of Protected Areas (PAs). Generally, species distributions declined in area over the 50year assessment period (2010-2060), with the greatest average declines occurring for moose (-40.9%) and wild turkey (-22.1%). Species resistance varied considerably across the region, with coyote demonstrating the highest average regional resistance (91.81% of the region) and moose demonstrating the lowest (0.76% of the region). At the state level, average focal species resistance was highest in Maine (the largest state) and lowest in Massachusetts. Many of the focal species showed high overlap in resistance and land protection. Coyote, white-tailed deer, and black bear had the highest probability of resistance, given protection, while moose and wild turkey had the highest probability of protection, given resistance. Overall, relatively small portions of New England-ranging between 0.25% and 21.12%-were both protected and resistant for the focal species. Our results provide estimates of resistance that can inform conservation planning for commonly harvested species that are important ecologically, economically, and culturally to the region. Expanding protected area coverage to include resistant areas may provide longer term benefits to these species.

Does land use matter? Carbon consequences of alternative land use futures in New England

“…In addition, we did not explicitly account for carbon leakage and substitution (i.e., the carbon emissions from products that would need to be garnered from new sources or locations given a reduction in the availability of timber), although these would impact overall carbon emissions for each of the scenarios. Finally, we did not address the myriad of other benefits forests have in the region, many of which have been explored in other papers using these scenarios (e.g., Thompson et al 2020, Pearman-Gillman et al 2020a, 2020b, Guswa et al 2020), instead limiting our focus to the direct carbon impacts of land use. We hope that these scenarios will continue to be used to explore the impacts of future land-use decisions on other ecosystem services.…”

“…The described NELF alternative scenarios are highly divergent in terms of the types, intensities, and spatial allocation of land use and, thus, represent a wide range of potential futures for the region’s forests and the services they provide (Figure 2). The land-cover change simulations have subsequently been used to evaluate a range of future outcomes, including flood potential (Guswa et al 2020), conservation priorities ( Losing Ground: Nature’s Value in a Changing Climate, Sixth Edition of the Losing Ground series 2020 , Thompson et al 2020), and wildlife habitat (Pearman-Gillman et al 2020a, 2020b).…”