Assessing the Impacts of Future Climate Change on Protected Area Networks: A Method to Simulate Individual Species' Responses |
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Authors: | Stephen G Willis Dave G Hole Yvonne C Collingham Geoff Hilton Carsten Rahbek Brian Huntley |
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Institution: | (1) Institute of Ecosystem Science, School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, University of Durham, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK;(2) Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Lodge, Sandy, Beds, SG19 2DL, UK;(3) Institute of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 15, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark |
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Abstract: | Global climate change, along with continued habitat loss and fragmentation, is now recognized as being a major threat to future
biodiversity. There is a very real threat to species, arising from the need to shift their ranges in the future to track regions
of suitable climate. The Important Bird Area (IBA) network is a series of sites designed to conserve avian diversity in the
face of current threats from factors such as habitat loss and fragmentation. However, in common with other networks, the IBA
network is based on the assumption that the climate will remain unchanged in the future. In this article, we provide a method
to simulate the occurrence of species of conservation concern in protected areas, which could be used as a first-step approach
to assess the potential impacts of climate change upon such species in protected areas. We use species-climate response surface
models to relate the occurrence of 12 biome-restricted African species to climate data at a coarse (quarter degree-degree
latitude-longitude) resolution and then intersect the grid model output with IBA outlines to simulate the occurrence of the
species in South African IBAs. Our results demonstrate that this relatively simple technique provides good simulations of
current species' occurrence in protected areas. We then use basic habitat data for IBAs along with habitat preference data
for the species to reduce over-prediction and further improve predictive ability. This approach can be used with future climate
change scenarios to highlight vulnerable species in IBAs in the future and allow practical recommendations to be made to enhance
the IBA network and minimize the predicted impacts of climate change. |
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Keywords: | Biodiversity Climate change Climate envelope modeling Protected area network |
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