Abstract
Climate change velocity is an increasingly used metric to assess the broad-scale climatic exposure and climate change induced risks to terrestrial and marine ecosystems. However, the utility of this metric in conservation planning can be enhanced by determining the velocities of multiple climatic drivers in real protected area (PA) networks on ecologically relevant scales. Here we investigate the velocities of three key bioclimatic variables across a nation-wide reserve network, and the consequences of including fine-grained topoclimatic data in velocity assessments. Using 50-m resolution data describing present-day and future topoclimates, we assessed the velocities of growing degree days, the mean January temperature and climatic water balance in the Natura 2000 PA network in Finland. The high-velocity areas for the three climate variables differed drastically, indicating contrasting exposure risks in different PAs. The 50-m resolution climate data revealed more realistic estimates of climate velocities and more overlap between the present-day and future climate spaces in the PAs than the 1-km resolution data. Even so, the current temperature conditions were projected to disappear from almost all the studied PAs by the end of this century. Thus, in PA networks with only moderate topographic variation, far-reaching climate change induced ecological changes may be inevitable.
Highlights
Climate change velocity is an increasingly used metric to assess the broad-scale climatic exposure and climate change induced risks to terrestrial and marine ecosystems
In addition to the climate velocity analysis, we examined the degree of overlap between the present-day range and projected future range of the three climate variables in each of the 5,068 Natura 2000 protected area (PA)
In our PAs, the three climate variables very rarely coincided in high-velocity areas, ranging from a 15.8% overlap between the GDD and WAB to zero overlap between GDD and TJan hotpots (Supplementary Table 1S)
Summary
Climate change velocity is an increasingly used metric to assess the broad-scale climatic exposure and climate change induced risks to terrestrial and marine ecosystems. The same predominance of meso- and macroclimates is evident in single-scale velocity studies which – except for Liang et al.15 – have employed climate data at a resolution of 800 m or coarser[2,4,9,16] This overlook of topoclimatic patterns in the velocity assessments of PAs may lead to biased exposure assessments especially in rugged terrain[3,11,17], as well as a limited ability to detect sites decoupled from the regional climate[18,19,20] and insufficient understanding of the degree of the overlap between present-day and future climate conditions in PAs2. A similar strong bias towards meso- and broad-scale velocity studies is evident in marine environments, substantial fine-scale climate change impacts and spatio-temporal climate refuges exist in the oceans[21]
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