From Frog to Forest Stewardship: Building Climate Resilience into Conservation
Dates
Publication Date
2022-03-08
Citation
Claudia Mengelt, 2022-03-08, From Frog to Forest Stewardship: Building Climate Resilience into Conservation: .
Summary
Incorporating climate change considerations into land management and species conservation remains challenging for natural resource managers, because other stressors such as drought or invasive species currently have a larger impact. Thus, it is often difficult to prioritize long-term goals when resources for the immediate needs of species are already difficult to secure. This project aims to combine the latest decision science with climate change refugia modeling to create a novel decision-framework that emphasizes a collaborative approach to complex management issues, which aims to bridge the gap between managing for current priorities and long-term climate change adaptation. In doing so, this framework will be used to give foresight [...]
Summary
Incorporating climate change considerations into land management and species conservation remains challenging for natural resource managers, because other stressors such as drought or invasive species currently have a larger impact. Thus, it is often difficult to prioritize long-term goals when resources for the immediate needs of species are already difficult to secure. This project aims to combine the latest decision science with climate change refugia modeling to create a novel decision-framework that emphasizes a collaborative approach to complex management issues, which aims to bridge the gap between managing for current priorities and long-term climate change adaptation. In doing so, this framework will be used to give foresight to current management actions, preventing maladaptive strategies and increasing climate change resilience, specifically with a focus on species persistence in the foothills in and around Yosemite NP. With the intention to eventually increase the scale of the project to multiple species across the landscape, the project will begin using the foothill yellow-legged frog as our focal species. The foothill yellow-legged frog has experienced significant population declines across the Southern extent of its historic range mostly due to threats such as land use changes, changes in hydrology, competition and/or predation from introduced species, and disease [1;2]. While these threats already pose challenges to species conservation, climate change will exasperate the risk to species’ persistence in this geography. To address both the current and future stressors to the foothill yellow-legged frog populations, specifically in the Sierra Nevada, this project aims to identify near term conservation strategies in the Southern Sierra Nevada that simultaneously lead to increased adaptive capacity to climate change impacts.
