Innovative Approaches for Identifying and Managing Climate-Change Refugia
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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.