Abstract
Climate-change adaptation focuses on conducting and translating research to minimize the dire impacts of anthropogenic climate change, including threats to biodiversity and human welfare. One adaptation strategy is to focus conservation on climate-change refugia (that is, areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change over time that enable persistence of valued physical, ecological, and sociocultural resources). In this Special Issue, recent methodological and conceptual advances in refugia science will be highlighted. Advances in this emerging subdiscipline are improving scientific understanding and conservation in the face of climate change by considering scale and ecosystem dynamics, and looking beyond climate exposure to sensitivity and adaptive capacity. We propose considering refugia in the context of a multifaceted, long-term, network-based approach, as temporal and spatial gradients of ecological persistence that can act as “slow lanes” rather than areas of stasis. After years of discussion confined primarily to the scientific literature, researchers and resource managers are now working together to put refugia conservation into practice.
Highlights
Climate-change adaptation focuses on conducting and translating research to minimize the dire impacts of anthropogenic climate change, including threats to biodiversity and human welfare
Climate-change refugia can serve as a “slow lane”, in that their relative buffering from climate change can protect native species and ecosystems from the negative effects of climate change in the short term, and provide longerterm havens from climate impacts for biodiversity and ecosystem function
The identification, protection, and management of climate-change refugia – generally defined as areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change – has increasingly been proposed as a focus of climate adaptation actions to support the persistence of species, communities, and ecosystems, as well as sociocultural values (Keppel et al 2015; Morelli et al 2016)
Summary
Climate-change refugia exist along spatial and temporal continuums (Figure 3; Keppel and Wardell-Johnson 2015), ranging from regional scales (where macrorefugia can facilitate ecosystem persistence over centuries and even millennia), to landscape and local scales (where microrefugia can maintain particular species and communities for years and decades), to “hyper-local” scales (where refuges can provide temporary shelter for individuals) (Fey et al 2019). Highly mobile species such as salmon or migratory butterflies might require networks of small, temporary refuges from exposure While these might be insufficient on their own in sustaining populations in the face of climate change, such features can play a critical supplemental role in supporting overall climate-change refugia for mobile species (Ebersole et al 2020). Such “ecosystem-protected” refugia – where ecosystem processes provide buffering against climate change – might be important as the magnitude of climate change exceeds the buffering capacity of terrain-m ediated refugia (Stralberg et al 2020)
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