The pervasive and accelerating impacts of climate change on ecosystems and species are making it increasingly difficult for natural resource managers to determine how and where to use limited staff time and funding for conservation. The identification and management of climate change refugia, areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change, is one climate adaptation strategy. We held remote workshops, meetings, and webinars with partners and stakeholders to develop regional lists of natural resource priorities in the northeastern and southwestern United States. In the Northeast, we developed maps of habitat suitability gain and loss and climate change refugia for 9 species (including 4 plants, 2 birds, and 3 salamanders) [...]
Summary
The pervasive and accelerating impacts of climate change on ecosystems and species are making it increasingly difficult for natural resource managers to determine how and where to use limited staff time and funding for conservation. The identification and management of climate change refugia, areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change, is one climate adaptation strategy. We held remote workshops, meetings, and webinars with partners and stakeholders to develop regional lists of natural resource priorities in the northeastern and southwestern United States. In the Northeast, we developed maps of habitat suitability gain and loss and climate change refugia for 9 species (including 4 plants, 2 birds, and 3 salamanders) to inform management plans for refugia conservation in national parks. These maps can be used to support both climate adaptation efforts for focal species in each national park individually and facilitate cross-park boundary collaborations as species ranges shift across parks in the Northeast. Additionally, we developed a framework to support climate change refugia conservation in the Sierra Nevada ecoregion of the Southwest. Using this framework, we demonstrated how existing mapping, data, and applications could be used for identifying, prioritizing, managing, and monitoring refugia. We focused on six stakeholder-identified conservation priorities: snow, fire, meadows, giant sequoia, old growth forests, and alpine communities. In doing so, we established the foundations for both near-term refugia conservation implementation and facilitated further discussion in moving from science to conservation practice in this ecoregion. More broadly, this project demonstrated the development and implementation of a framework for how to incorporate refugia into climate change adaptation into natural resource management in different regions across the country.
