Over the past decade, The Nature Conservancy has increasingly adopted three primary principles for conserving biodiversity: conserving nature’s stage (geophysical), focusing on climate-resilient sites (strongholds), and identifying and prioritizing key connectors (allowing movement and range shifts). This conservation platform is built upon research conducted by Anderson and Feree (2010) demonstrating that, contrary to conventional conservation theory, biodiversity is primarily explained by geophysical factors, not climate. Anderson and Ferree’s model demonstrated that four factors predicted biodiversity with certainty (R2 = 0.94): geologic class, latitude, amount of calcareous bedrock, and elevation range. This species-geology relationship was further confirmed with model validation; Anderson and Ferree used 18,700 location points for 885 rare species and found that 40% of these species were confined to a single geography. These results indicate that protecting geophysical settings will conserve present and future biodiversity and offer a robust implementation alternative to traditional single species management. As a result of this research, The Nature Conservancy fully embraced a conservation focus which shifts away from species-specific conservation (conserving the “actors”), and instead prioritizes conservation of resilient and connected landscapes (conserving “the stage”).
Results/Conclusions
Scientists with The Nature Conservancy have continued to refine and map the most important resilient and connected landscapes within North America. This work is focused on identifying the highest priority lands necessary to sustain biodiversity long-term, and to allow nature to move and re-arrange in response to climate change. An example of implementation of this work is found within the Central Appalachian landscape, which represents a case study in using geodiversity to protect biodiversity. The Central Appalachians are home to nearly unparalleled biodiversity in North America; additionally, electronic circuit modeling (Lawler et al, 2015) indicates this system is the among the most important climate migration corridors in North America. Conserving this critical landscape is a top priority for The Nature Conservancy, with implementation efforts driven entirely by the climate resiliency science. Within this landscape, “action mapping” is currently taking place to identify priorities for traditional land protection, natural climate solutions (forest carbon), and managing forests for resiliency via tools like prescribed fire. By using this targeted approach, we seek to conserve critical landscapes, at scale, ultimately using geodiversity to protect biodiversity.