You are here:
Innovative Approaches for Identifying and Managing Climate-Change Refugia
Citation:
Morelli, T., C. Barrows, A. Ramirez, J. Cartwright, D. Ackerly, T. Eaves, Joe Ebersole, M. Krawchuk, B. Letcher, M. Mahalovich, G. Meigs, J. Michalak, C. Millar, R. Quiñones, D. Stralberg, AND J. Thorne. Innovative Approaches for Identifying and Managing Climate-Change Refugia. North American Congress for Conservation Biology, Denver, CO, July 26 - 31, 2020.
Impact/Purpose:
Climate refugia are places where the effects of climate change are much less severe or will be experienced more slowly, due to buffering by groundwater, complex terrain, microclimate, or other moderating factors. This invited overview talk introduces a special symposium on climate refugia at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology. This overview will showcase a suite of papers that exemplify the considerable methodological and conceptual advances in refugia science in recent years. Refugia thinking is increasingly incorporating complexity of spatial and temporal scales via incorporating of new technologies and modeling advances. Other advances include more comprehensive consideration of sensitivity and adaptive capacity of species. Advances in operationalizing the refugia concept via on-the-ground management are providing new examples that are beginning to overcome some of the institutional, scientific, and logistical challenges of refugia management.
Description:
Climate change adaptation focuses on conducting and translating research to minimize the dire impacts of climate change, including threats to biodiversity and human welfare. One adaptation strategy is to focus conservation on climate change refugia, areas where a slower pace of climate change enables longer term resource persistence. This presentation, and this session, will highlight recent methodological and conceptual advances in refugia science. This young subdiscipline is moving forward to improve scientific understanding and conservation in the face of climate change by considering the scale of refugia processes, including ecosystem dynamics, and looking beyond climate exposure to sensitivity and adaptive capacity. Climate change refugia can be considered in the context of a multi-faceted, long-term network approach as temporal and spatial gradients of ecological persistence rather than discrete points of stasis, a “slow lane” in which resident biodiversity and ecosystem function are protected from the negative effects of climate change in the short term, and provide transitional havens for other species and ecosystems in the long term. Natural resource managers and conservation practitioners now have theory, guidance, and concrete examples for how to apply the refugia concept. Climate change refugia can be identified and managed by incorporating the full suite of ecological complexity, spatiotemporal scales, and relevant species traits and community dynamics alongside climatic and topographic predictors. After years of discussion confined primarily to the scientific literature, researchers and resource managers are now working together to put refugia conservation into practice.