Increasingly conservation and management practitioners are required to make decisions about allocation of resources based on vulnerability assessments that incorporate exposure risk and adaptive capacity of species. But there is little agreement on how to quantify that capacity efficiently or rigorously. Further, resource allocation decisions cannot be based on adaptive capacity alone; the relative importance of the organism to ecosystem function must also be considered for conservation resources to be effectively allocated. Species with high functional importance and low adaptive capacity require urgent management attention, whereas those with both low adaptive capacity and functional importance most likely not. But where is the science to enable to such decisions to be made objectively? Expert opinion is emerging as a way to augment empirical resources in a time of rapid change. We applied the IDEA framework which allows for rigorous, structured assessment of expert reliability, and imposes clear protocols for elicitation of information. We will report on the outcomes of a working group involving expert botanists, ecologists and land managers, where we assessed the application for expert elicitation to predict the adaptive capacity of plant species within Australia’s critically threatened alpine and mountain biomes over the next 25 - 50 years.
Results/Conclusions
Preliminary analysis suggests experts have a high level of certainty around predicting community level shifts, and some species level shifts. For example, species within snow-patch communities were predicted to decline in cover, and woodlands to increase. However, predictions for species from other biomes were more variable. With respect to functional importance, there were some species of considerable functional importance for which experts predicted little adaptive capacity, and some of low functional importance for which high adaptive capacity was noted. Interestingly, there are some species of significant functional importance about which experts agreed the trajectory was highly uncertain. Continued investigations will focus upon how predictions of adaptive capacity reflect hypothesis around plant traits, population dynamics and environmental change. The use of robust expert elicitation processes not only provide insights into where experts agree on likely impacts of climate change upon species performance, but also provide direction for where research priorities should be focused. This may be of particular importance within biomes and communities where trait collection is both difficult and time consuming, and the relative risk of inaction is high.