Abstract
Addressing uncertainties in climate vulnerability remains a challenge for conservation planning. We evaluate how confidence in conservation recommendations may change with agreement among alternative climate projections and metrics of climate exposure. We assessed agreement among three multivariate estimates of climate exposure (forward velocity, backward velocity, and climate dissimilarity) using 18 alternative climate projections for the contiguous United States. For each metric, we classified maps into quartiles for each alternative climate projections, and calculated the frequency of quartiles assigned for each gridded location (high quartile frequency = more agreement among climate projections). We evaluated recommendations using a recent climate adaptation heuristic framework that recommends emphasizing various conservation strategies to land based on current conservation value and expected climate exposure. We found that areas where conservation strategies would be confidently assigned based on high agreement among climate projections varied substantially across regions. In general, there was more agreement in forward and backward velocity estimates among alternative projections than agreement in estimates of local dissimilarity. Consensus of climate predictions resulted in the same conservation recommendation assignments in a few areas, but patterns varied by climate exposure metric. This work demonstrates an approach for explicitly evaluating alternative predictions in geographic patterns of climate change.
Highlights
Ongoing changes in climate affect ecosystem composition, structure, and function[1,2,3], and paleorecords clearly indicate a high sensitivity of species and ecosystem distributions to climate change[4,5]
Climate vulnerability has been described as a function of climate exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity[23], though we focus here on climate exposure
Variability in climate change projections can arise through various means including use of different baseline climatological data[33], emissions scenarios or representative concentration pathways[28,34,35], downscaling methods[36], general circulation models (GCMs37), choice of climate vulnerability metrics[22,26,38], and predicted ecological responses[30,32,39,40,41,42,43], among others
Summary
Ongoing changes in climate affect ecosystem composition, structure, and function[1,2,3], and paleorecords clearly indicate a high sensitivity of species and ecosystem distributions to climate change[4,5]. Climate change and other human-caused stressors have resulted in calls to adjust management strategies in protected areas[13] Faced with these challenges, climate adaptation heuristics to support conservation decisions have been developed using assessments of existing ecological conditions while considering the predicted or observed impacts of climate change[14,15,16,17] (Fig. 1). Climate adaptation heuristics to support conservation decisions have been developed using assessments of existing ecological conditions while considering the predicted or observed impacts of climate change[14,15,16,17] (Fig. 1) These heuristic frameworks can guide management decisions, while providing conceptual foundations to support mapped data indicating lands where various conservation strategies would reasonably be emphasized[16,17]. Variability in climate change projections can arise through various means including use of different baseline climatological data[33], emissions scenarios or representative concentration pathways[28,34,35], downscaling methods[36], general circulation models (GCMs37), choice of climate vulnerability metrics[22,26,38], and predicted ecological responses[30,32,39,40,41,42,43], among others
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