Land managers have incorporated threats to biodiversity for nearly two decades, but very few efforts have included threats from future conditions and fewer still have assessed vulnerability to climate change. This project will address two themes: 1) providing foundational information about habitat fragmentation and connectivity and 2) identifying the degree of vulnerability of key habitats to climate change.
For development of understanding broadextent, a landscape-level pattern of climate change is an important complement to approaches to estimate rangeshifts for certain key focal species. Ecological system types (i.e. coarsefilters) are widely used in conservation planning because they contain valuable resources and because they represent key elements of habitat for many species.
This project will generally follow the conservation planning framework recently developed to assess climate vulnerability (Glick, P. et al. (eds.). 2011. Scanning the conservation horizon: a guide to climate change vulnerability assessment. National Wildlife Federation, Washington, DC.). Vulnerability refers to the extent to which a species, habitat, or ecosystem is susceptible to harm from climate change impacts. Recognizing the broader framework, this project focuses on the technical aspects of assessing vulnerability. The primary components of vulnerability (e.g., for an ecological system) are the exposure to change, the sensitivity of the ecological system to that change, and the capacity or ability for species/processes to adapt to change.
FY2011Land managers have incorporated threats to biodiversity for nearly two decades, but very few efforts have included threats from future conditions and fewer still have assessed vulnerability to climate change. This project will address two themes: 1) providing foundational information about habitat fragmentation and connectivity and 2) identifying the degree of vulnerability of key habitats to climate change.
For development of understanding broadextent, a landscape-level pattern of climate change is an important complement to approaches to estimate rangeshifts for certain key focal species. Ecological system types (i.e. coarsefilters) are widely used in conservation planning because they contain valuable resources and because they represent key elements of habitat for many species.
This project will generally follow the conservation planning framework recently developed to assess climate vulnerability (Glick, P. et al. (eds.). 2011. Scanning the conservation horizon: a guide to climate change vulnerability assessment. National Wildlife Federation, Washington, DC.). Vulnerability refers to the extent to which a species, habitat, or ecosystem is susceptible to harm from climate change impacts. Recognizing the broader framework, this project focuses on the technical aspects of assessing vulnerability. The primary components of vulnerability (e.g., for an ecological system) are the exposure to change, the sensitivity of the ecological system to that change, and the capacity or ability for species/processes to adapt to change.
