Anticipating potential shifts in plant communities has been a major challenge in climate change ecology. In Hawaiʻi, 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 aimed at climate change mitigation and adaptation. • As a first approximation of such changes, 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 (for example, dry, mesic, and wet areas) that form the basis of natural landcover classification classes in Hawaiʻi (for example, dry forests, wet forests, mesic shrublands). • In this approach we modeled the suitability of the landscape to each moisture zone based on its relation to mean annual temperature, wet season precipitation, and dry season precipitation and then integrated these individual moisturezone models into landscape moisture-zone projections under current and end-of-century climate scenarios. • We integrated our moisture-zone projections into 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 moisture zones 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.
