Final Report: Developing a Climate Change-Informed “Conservation Opportunity Area” Portfolio for Sensitive Species’ Preservation
Dates
Publication Date
2024-02-28
Citation
Esteban Muldavin, 2024-02-28, Final Report: Developing a Climate Change-Informed “Conservation Opportunity Area” Portfolio for Sensitive Species’ Preservation: U.S. Geological Survey.
Summary
Integrating climate change into place-based conservation presents a pressing challenge for promoting future biodiversity conservation success. In particular, the broad effects of climate change can make it difficult to prioritize specific actions in specific places. Natural Heritage New Mexico, along with state and federal partners, has developed Conservation Opportunity Areas (COAs) for New Mexico representing locations where limited conservation funds can be effectively used for preserving sensitive species (COAs include Important Plant Areas). Although the COAs currently represent our best estimate of where conservation activities are most likely to have favorable outcomes, they do not account for climate change and conservation [...]
Summary
Integrating climate change into place-based conservation presents a pressing challenge for promoting future biodiversity conservation success. In particular, the broad effects of climate change can make it difficult to prioritize specific actions in specific places. Natural Heritage New Mexico, along with state and federal partners, has developed Conservation Opportunity Areas (COAs) for New Mexico representing locations where limited conservation funds can be effectively used for preserving sensitive species (COAs include Important Plant Areas). Although the COAs currently represent our best estimate of where conservation activities are most likely to have favorable outcomes, they do not account for climate change and conservation in the future. To address this, we chose 20 species of conservation concern (10 animals and 10 plants) that were representative of environments from desert to alpine across New Mexico and modeled their distributions in the 2060, 2075, and 2090. The outcomes suggested that with a changing climate, the conservation of at-risk species in New Mexico will present challenges with several species (but not all) showing significant loss of habitat by 2075 even under a moderate carbon emissions scenario (particularly plants). Many species showed retreats from south to north and up in elevation. With that, COAs as they are now will only offer limited refugia in the future for rare animals and plants—COASs will need to be modified, expanded, and new ones considered to create a portfolio of climate-informed COAs to address the long-term persistence of sensitive species in the face climate change. Next steps will be to expand the modeling to species from riparian zones and wetlands, the most critically imperiled habitats in the desert Southwest, and integrating ecosystem change directly into this place-based framework to support conservation planners, land managers, and the public in meeting the challenge of species conservation in the 21st century.
