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Abstract
Climate change is a threat to biodiversity, and adaptation measures should be considered in biodiversity conservation planning. Protected areas (PA) are expected to be impacted by climate change and improving their connectivity with biological corridors (BC) has been proposed as a potential adaptation measure, although assessing its effectiveness remains a challenge. In Mesoamerica, efforts to preserve the biodiversity have led to the creation of a regional network of PA and, more recently, BC. This study evaluates the role of BC for facilitating plant dispersal between PA under climate change in Mesoamerica. A spatially explicit dynamic model (cellular automaton) was developed to simulate species dispersal under different climate and conservation policy scenarios. Plant functional types (PFT) were defined based on a range of dispersal rates and vegetation types to represent the diversity of species in the region. The impacts of climate change on PA and the role of BC for dispersal were assessed spatially. Results show that most impacted PA are those with low altitudinal range in hot, dry, or high latitude areas. PA with low altitudinal range in high cool areas benefit the most from corridors. The most important corridors cover larger areas and have high altitude gradients. Only the fastest PFT can keep up with the expected change in climate and benefit from corridors for dispersal. We conclude that the spatial assessment of the vulnerability of PA and the role of corridors in facilitating dispersal can help conservation planning under a changing climate.
Highlights
Climate change is a major threat to biodiversity (MEA 2005; Pereira et al 2010, 2012)
The range of accumulated dispersal distance is larger (100 km in a 10-year time step for the fastest Plant functional types (PFT) under long-distance dispersal (LDD)), but within ecological timescales proposed for several LDD mechanisms that operate over nonforested areas (Nathan et al 2008); LDD can become an important species trait
We assumed that all species are vegetation type–specific and we did not account for the possibility of vegetation types sharing species (Malcolm et al 2006) which could overestimate impacts
Summary
Climate change is a major threat to biodiversity (MEA 2005; Pereira et al 2010, 2012). It will affect the geographic ranges of species (Walther et al 2002; Parmesan and Yohe 2003) and ecosystems species, populations, and communities. Future distribution of species and ecosystems depends on the ability of plants to migrate (Pitelka et al 1997). Habitat fragmentation may reduce plant migration capacity by reducing suitable habitat for successful colonization (Pitelka et al 1997; Higgins et al 2003b). Biological corridors (BC) can facilitate migration between valuable biodiversity areas (e.g., protected areas [PA]). Corridors facilitate movement between habitat patches, especially the movement of invertebrates, nonavian vertebrates, and plants (Gilbert-Norton et al 2010; Hannah 2011)
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