The value of a multi-faceted climate change vulnerability assessment to managing protected lands: Lessons from a case study in Point Reyes National Seashore

Abstract

Managing protected areas in the face of an uncertain future climate poses serious challenges. There are currently a variety of predictive and analytical methods for assessing future climates and biological responses to the changes, but an assessment produced by any one of these methods is necessarily limited in scope. When making management decisions, therefore, it is beneficial to have information from a variety of sources and analytical methods, and to compare the agreements and discrepancies among them. Based on existing climate change vulnerability assessment frameworks in the literature, we developed a multi-faceted climate change vulnerability assessment at the biological community level comprised of: a) expert judgment, b) predictive vegetation mapping, c) predictive geophysical mapping, and d) species-specific evaluations. We wrote a climate change vulnerability assessment for Point Reyes National Seashore and evaluated the usefulness of each facet, alone and in concert. We found that the facets were complementary and that each one was useful to inform some management goals; we also found that expert judgment was the most widely applicable and flexible assessment method. We believe that this multi-faceted framework can be employed in other protected areas to facilitate management decisions under a changing and uncertain future climate.