Persist in place or shift in space? Evaluating the adaptive capacity of species to climate change

Abstract (from Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment): Assessing the vulnerability of species to climate change serves as the basis for climate-adaptation planning and climate-smart conservation, and typically involves an evaluation of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity (AC). AC is a species’ ability to cope with or adjust to changing climatic conditions, and is the least understood and most inconsistently applied of these three factors. We propose an attribute-based framework for evaluating the AC of species, identifying two general classes of adaptive responses: “persist in place” and “shift in space”. Persist-in-place attributes enable species to survive in situ, whereas the shift-in-space response emphasizes attributes [...]