· Anticipating potential shifts in plant communities has been a major challenge in climate-change ecology. In the State of Hawaii, where conservation efforts tend to be habitat focused, the lack of projections of vegetation shifts under future climate is a major knowledge gap for developing management actions for climate-change mitigation and adaptation.
· As a first approximation, we have modeled potential shifts of terrestrial vegetation across the Hawaiian landscape between now and the end of this century. Our approach relies on modeling the relation between current climate and the distribution of broad climatically determined moisture zones (MZs; for example, wet, mesic, and dry areas) that form the basis of natural land-cover classification classes in Hawaiʻi (for example, wet forests, dry forests, and mesic shrublands).
· In this approach, we modeled the suitability of the landscape to each MZ based on its relation to mean annual temperature (MAT) and wet and dry season precipitation and then integrated these individual moisture-zone models into landscape MZ projections under current and end of century climate scenarios.
· We integrate our MZ projections to a detailed Hawaiʻi land-cover map to derive a first approximation of climate-based shifts in land cover in Hawaiʻi. The results show we can accurately replicate the current distribution of Hawaiian MZs using simple climate metrics based on temperature and precipitation.
· Our resulting models identify areas in the landscape where projected shifts in climate may lead to moisture-driven vegetation shifts with clear consequences to overall carbon storage across the archipelago.
