Climate change is one of the most significant threats to global biodiversity and species persistence, and its practical inclusion in conservation designs presents a continual modeling challenge. To address these geospatial needs, conservationists are calling for the identification of areas of stable climatic and environmental conditions that may support the preservation, adaptation, and dispersal of diverse taxa. Due to their historically-proven buffered conditions, climate refugia are valuable conservation targets that function as robust bastions for endemic species. We used a novel geospatial modeling approach to define the potential stability of refugial areas across a large topographically-complex and biologically-diverse montane region of 344,280 km2, through a multi-disciplinary methodology using regional-scale temperature data from the latter half of the 20th century. By applying multivariate control chart techniques adapted from engineering, we assessed the stability of montane refugial patterns, based on climatic and topographic data.
Results/Conclusions
Mapped representations of likely stable sites via this statistical model indicated greater stability and refugial potential within higher elevation ridges and plateaus. To understand conservation implications, we analyzed the degree to which geodiversity-based resilient sites captured these stable areas and how much stable areas were covered by the existing protected areas network. The gap analysis found moderate levels of agreement (25-45%), suggesting model-defined stable sites could make a useful additional conservation target in montane areas, as well as geodiversity-based and traditional conservation approaches that capture, to a degree, climatically stable refugia.