Strengthening protected areas for climate refugia on the Tibetan Plateau, China

Abstract

Protected areas (PAs) are at the forefront of efforts to conserve and restore biodiversity, while climate change can risk compromising the ecological benefits of PAs. Therefore, targeting conservation and adaptation efforts necessitate a well-understand of the relationship between PAs and climate refugia, defined as the regions can buffer the impact of climate change. Recent attempts to identify climate refugia were primarily based on terrain-mediated features or climatic velocity, ignoring the ecosystem's internal processes. This work identified climate refugia on the Tibetan Plateau (TP), an amplifier of drastic global climate warming, based on environmental diversity, phenology stability and climatic velocity, highlighting the capacity to cope with extreme weather events, synchronization with plant growth cycles and future climate adaptation, respectively. The results show the distribution of climate refugia using different environmental diversity indicators (e.g., vegetation and topography) vary slightly but differs substantially from the priorities using phenology stability and climatic velocity. For instance, the high distribution probability of climate refugia derived from environmental diversity and climatic velocity is mainly concentrated at low (<3000 m) or high elevations (>6000 m), while the one using phenology stability is mainly observed at 3000 m–3800 m. The inconsistent distribution of different types of refugia weakens the potential of functional complementarity. The existing nature reserves, the primary type of PAs in China, have critical conservation gaps in different types of climate refugia, indicating the urgency of incorporating climate refugia into PAs conservation planning on TP. Our work could help inform local conservation policies and improve the effectiveness of PAs.