Would climate change drive species out of reserves? An assessment of existing reserve‐selection methods

Abstract

Concern for climate change has not yet been integrated in protocols for reserve selection. However if climate changes as projected, there is a possibility that current reserveselection methods might provide solutions that are inadequate to ensure species' longterm persistence within reserves. We assessed, for the first time, the ability of existing reserve-selection methods to secure species in a climate-change context. Six methods using a different combination of criteria (representation, suitability and reserve clustering) are compared. The assessment is carried out using European distributions of 1200 plant species and considering two extreme scenarios of response to climate change: no dispersal and universal dispersal. With our data, 6-11% of species modelled would be potentially lost from selected reserves in a 50-year period. Measured uncertainties varied in 6% being 1-3% attributed to dispersal assumptions and 2-5% to the choice of reserve-selection method. Suitability approaches to reserve selection performed best, while reserve clustering performed poorly. We also found that 5% of species modelled would lose their entire climatic envelope in the studied area; 2% of the species modelled would have nonoverlapping distributions; 93% of the species modelled would maintain varying levels of overlapping distributions. We conclude there are opportunities to minimize species' extinctions within reserves but new approaches are needed to account for impacts of climate change on species; especially for those projected to have temporally nonoverlapping distributions.

Optimizing resiliency of reserve networks to climate change: multispecies conservation planning in the Pacific Northwest, USA

“…The effectiveness of a fixed system of reserves may be compromised under climate change, a problem that may be compounded when well-studied vertebrate species are used as umbrellas for other taxa (Andelman & Fagan, 2000;Araú jo et al, 2004). As species' niches shift individualistically, species whose distribution coincidentally overlaps under current climate may diverge in distribution under future climates.…”

“…This increases the challenges to evaluating the effectiveness of such reserves under climate change as species' habitat migrates to nonreserved areas (Araú jo et al, 2004). Recent efforts have combined new robust habitat modeling methods for presence-only data (MAXENT; Phillips et al, 2006;Phillips & Dudik, 2008) with reserve selection software adapted to process the large numbers of resultant habitat suitability surfaces (ZONATION; Moilanen et al, 2005;Moilanen & Kujala, 2008) to identify reserve systems that optimize habitat quality and connectivity for many species across large regions Correspondence: Carlos Carroll, e-mail: carlos@klamathconservat ion.org Global Change Biology (2010Biology ( ) 16, 891-904, doi: 10.1111Biology ( /j.1365Biology ( -2486Biology ( .2009 r 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd (Kremen et al, 2008;Leathwick et al, 2008;Thomson et al, 2009).…”

Impacts of climate change and land-use scenarios on Margaritifera margaritifera, an environmental indicator and endangered species

“…The effects of the ongoing global warming can be observed in many terrestrial, freshwater and marine species that have shifted their geographic ranges, seasonal activities, migration patterns, abundances, and species interactions, namely: freshwater fishes (Regier and Meisner, 1990), plants (Araujo et al, 2004;Lemieux and Scott, 2005), mammals (Burns et al, 2003), small birds (Wilby and Perry, 2006), and macroinvertebrates (Bonada et al, 2007). According to McLaughlin et al (2002) as well as to Pounds et al (2006), these changes in climate may have already caused several species extinctions.…”

Predicting the future of forests in the Mediterranean under climate change, with niche- and process-based models: CO2 matters!

“…As such, nichebased models are used extensively and have provided researchers with an innovative tool to explore diverse questions in ecology and conservation (see Peterson, 2007). In particular, it has become common to use such models to assess potential distribution responses to future climate scenarios (e.g., Bakkenes et al, 2002;Araú jo et al, 2004;Thomas et al, 2004;Thuiller et al, 2005;Gomez-Mendoza & Arriaga, 2007;Thuiller, 2010), using sophisticated interpolation of climate data (e.g., Hijmans et al, 2005). One of the main advantages of niche-based models is their relative simplicity, making it straightforward to develop species-specific models, which make use of the large data sets available (e.g., Forest inventories, regionalized climate).…”