Climate adaptation interventions for iconic fauna

Claire Mason,Alistair J Hobday,Mary‐Anne Lea,Rachael Alderman

doi:10.1111/csp2.434

Claire Mason, Alistair J Hobday + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.434

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Abstract

AbstractClimate adaptation is an emerging practice in biodiversity conservation, but little is known about the scope, scale, and effectiveness of implemented actions. Here, we review and synthesize published reports of climate adaptation interventions for iconic fauna. We present a systematic map of peer‐reviewed literature databases (Web of Science and Scopus); however, only nine climate adaptation actions targeting iconic fauna were returned. In the grey and informal literature, there were many instances of practical intervention within our scope, that were not uncovered during traditional systematic search methods. The richness of actions reported in commercial news, government and non‐government organization media outlets and other online sources vastly outweighs the limited studies that have been robustly evaluated and reported in the scientific literature. From our investigation of this emerging field of conservation practice, we draw insights and pen a series of recommendations for the field moving forward. Key recommendations for future adaptation interventions include: the sharing and publishing of climate‐related conservation interventions, the use of standardized metrics for reporting outcomes, the implementation of experimental controls for any actions undertaken, and reporting and evaluation of both failures and successes.

Highlights

Evidence of climate change impacts on species, habitats and ecosystems has been widely reported from around the world (Poloczanska et al, 2013)
The challenges of performing this synthesis is one of our key findings—that climate adaptation actions we uncovered during our ad hoc search were often a quick response to a real-time threat using managers' unique understanding of the system on a limited budget
In total we found 112 actions using these searches, subsequent snowballing searches, the Conservation Evidence database, additional studies known to the authors, or studies discovered serendipitously by the authors until March 1, 2019

Summary

Introduction

Evidence of climate change impacts on species, habitats and ecosystems has been widely reported from around the world (Poloczanska et al, 2013). These impacts include shifts in species' distributions (Chen, Hill, Ohlemüller, Roy, & Thomas, 2011; Lenoir & Svenning, 2015; Pecl et al, 2017), abundance (Sturm, Racine, & Tape, 2001), physiology (Munday et al, 2009), phenology (Cohen, Lajeunesse, & Rohr, 2018; Forrest, 2016; Radchuk et al, 2019), and species interactions (Putten, Macel, & Visser, 2010). Many species are moving toward the poles and mountain tops to escape increasing temperatures (Chen et al, 2011; Lenoir & Svenning, 2015; Pecl et al, 2017) or seeking refugia in the landscape

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