Protected areas alleviate climate change effects on northern bird species of conservation concern.

Raimo Virkkala,Risto K Heikkinen,Aleksi Lehikoinen,Juha Pöyry,Jari Valkama

doi:10.1002/ece3.1162

Raimo Virkkala, Risto K Heikkinen + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.1162

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Abstract

Global climate change is a major threat to biodiversity, posing increasing pressures on species to adapt in situ or shift their ranges. A protected area network is one of the main instruments to alleviate the negative impacts of climate change. Importantly, protected area networks might be expected to enhance the resilience of regional populations of species of conservation concern, resulting in slower species loss in landscapes with a significant amount of protected habitat compared to unprotected landscapes. Based on national bird atlases compiled in 1974–1989 and 2006–2010, this study examines the recent range shifts in 90 forest, mire, marshland, and Arctic mountain heath bird species of conservation concern in Finland, as well as the changes in their species richness in protected versus unprotected areas. The trends emerging from the atlas data comparisons were also related to the earlier study dealing with predictions of distributional changes for these species for the time slice of 2051–2080, developed using bioclimatic envelope models (BEMs). Our results suggest that the observed changes in bird distributions are in the same direction as the BEM-based predictions, resulting in a decrease in species richness of mire and Arctic mountain heath species and an increase in marshland species. The patterns of changes in species richness between the two time slices are in general parallel in protected and unprotected areas. However, importantly, protected areas maintained a higher level of species richness than unprotected areas. This finding provides support for the significance and resilience provision of protected area networks in preserving species of conservation concern under climate change.

Highlights

Global climate change is a major threat to biodiversity (Pereira et al 2010), already affecting species populations and communities (Hickling et al 2006; Parmesan 2006; Chen et al 2011) and is projected to cause accelerating poleward and upward range shifts in different taxa (Araujo et al 2011; Barbet-Massin et al 2012)
We focused on the same bird species that were included in the study by Virkkala et al (2013a,b), who forecasted the future range shifts of 100 bird species of conservation concern using bioclimatic envelope models (BEMs)
Previous studies have compared predictions of range shifts derived from bioclimatic envelope models (BEM) to the observed range changes (Araujo et al 2005; Hijmans and Graham 2006; Eskildsen et al 2013; Watling et al 2013), but these studies have not considered how such changes are modified by the presence of protected areas

Summary

Introduction

Global climate change is a major threat to biodiversity (Pereira et al 2010), already affecting species populations and communities (Hickling et al 2006; Parmesan 2006; Chen et al 2011) and is projected to cause accelerating poleward and upward range shifts in different taxa (Araujo et al 2011; Barbet-Massin et al 2012). BEMs have certain limitations (Heikkinen et al 2006a; Sinclair et al 2010; Sieck et al 2011) but when applied with caution, they can provide useful broad-scale projections of the direction and magnitude of potential changes in species distributions (Araujo and Peterson 2012). These projections may be used as a basis for conservation planning assessments, to examine the potential species losses, turnover and gain in conservation areas, and future gaps in the protected area (PA) network (Hannah et al 2007; Hole et al 2009, 2011; Araujo et al 2011).

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