In the face of climate change, conservation efforts must explicitly account for variability in the vulnerability of ecological systems to multiple shifting environmental conditions. When prioritizing conservation across broad landscapes, it is often prudent to focus on areas of relatively low vulnerability to climate shifts – i.e. climate refugia. Assessing an area’s climate vulnerability primarily requires quantifying overall exposure to climate impacts, typically using metrics such as climate velocities. While these proxy measures of climate vulnerability can alone aid in the identification of climate refugia, relatively little has been done to incorporate them into the spatial conservation frameworks that simultaneously address management goals (e.g. species protection) and factors affecting the likelihood of achieving those goals. By integrating a wider variety of social-ecological variables, systematic landscape planning strategies can be utilized to efficiently identify potential climate refugia for conservation. We estimated climate exposure within the US Southern Rockies region by calculating climate velocities. We then used the software Marxan to prioritize areas of minimal climate exposure while additionally accounting for the presence of species of interest, protected areas, and environmental risks. Lastly, we evaluated the adaptability of existing protected areas by comparing their characteristics with those of optimized climate refugia.
Results/Conclusions
Values of velocity-based climate exposure varied considerably across the study region, with areas of lowest exposure typically located in the steep slopes of the region’s mountain ranges. Our model framework successfully identified priority climate refugia that were within the ranges of the region’s threatened wildlife species. Explicitly accounting for the presence of human development as a risk to conservation success served to further identify the highest priority areas. While many optimized climate refugia fell within existing protected areas, climate exposure and modeled priority varied considerably within and between individual protected areas. Our results highlight the need for more thorough spatial assessment of factors contributing to ecological vulnerabilities and likelihoods of conservation success. We hope that the results and framework we outline here will aid managers in efficiently allocating conservation resources with the goal of promoting ecological resilience.