Systematic conservation planning in the face of climate change: Bet-hedging on the Columbia plateau

Systematic conservation planning in the face of climate change: Bet-hedging on the Columbia plateau [1]

Systematic conservation planning efforts typically focus on protecting current patterns of biodiversity. Climate change is poised to shift species distributions, reshuffle communities, and alter ecosystem functioning. In such a dynamic environment, lands selected to protect today's biodiversity may fail to do so in the future. One proposed approach to designing reserve networks that are robust to climate change involves protecting the diversity of abiotic conditions that in part determine species distributions and ecological processes. A set of abiotically diverse areas will likely support a diversity of ecological systems both today and into the future, although those two sets of systems might be dramatically different. Here, we demonstrate a conservation planning approach based on representing unique combinations of abiotic factors. We prioritize sites that represent the diversity of soils, topographies, and current climates of the Columbia Plateau.

Publication Date:

08/12/2011

Author(s): Carrie A. Schloss [2], Joshua J. Lawler [3], Eric R. Larson & et al [4]

Source: PLoS ONE [5]

Vol:

Issue:

pp:

1-9

Tags: