Climate Change
Digests about corridors and climate change
Ignore at your own risk: scaling-down climate change response to the individual
Range shifts are a common predicted response to climate warming for many species. However, predictions of how species will move often ignore the variation that can occur both between populations of a species and between [...]
Review: plant responses to climate change
Need to catch up on the latest climate change science? A new review by Christmas et al. looks at climate change adaptation, focusing on both the responses of and potential impacts on plants (particularly trees). [...]
Review: facilitating range shifts across barriers
Looking to catch up on recent advances and strategies for facilitating range shifts as a response to climate change? A new review by Robillard et al. in Conservation Biology provides a look at the impact [...]
Safeguarding pollination and other ecosystem services for the future
The value of ecosystem services is often hard to determine, but undoubtedly high in both fragmented and connected landscapes. A new study in PLoS ONE by Giannini et al. takes a novel approach to calculating [...]
Conserving – and connecting – nature’s stage
Conserving Nature’s Stage is a new concept that encapsulates efforts to focus conservation attention on the diversity of physical environments found on Earth. If conserved, this “geodiversity” sets the stage for the actors – the [...]
Lattice-work corridors as a response to climate change
Corridors must often fulfill the dual role of enabling dispersal as well as allowing for population persistence, which can be a challenge even without the added complication of a rapidly changing climate. A new publication [...]
Will climate change impact animal behavior in corridors?
Habitat fragmentation and climate change, two of the biggest threats to biodiversity around the globe, might potentially cause synergistic effects that are as yet unknown. Will climate change exacerbate the isolation of fragmentation? Will patchier [...]
Some species will successfully shift ranges under climate change. Many will not.
Climate change. Forest loss. Agricultural intensification. Urbanization and policy change and international markets. The list of factors that influence ecological networks (i.e. connectivity) over the long-term seems to be growing daily, and parsing out their [...]
Protected areas lack connectivity along elevational gradients
A key question of protected areas around the globe is how well they will continue to preserve biodiversity in the face of climate change. As temperatures push species' ranges poleward and upward, there is a [...]
Corridors can help mitigate range shifts in Malagasy lemurs
The combination of geographical isolation, widespread deforestation, political uncertainty and incredible endemic biodiversity has always made Madagascar a conservation hotspot. It will continue to be so in the future, where climate change and human population [...]
Will climate change impact connectivity of marine protected areas?
Marine protected areas act as valuable management tools, often maintaining source populations of fish that support surrounding fished areas through larval dispersal. But will they continue to ensure population persistence given predicted climate change? Shifting [...]
The price of connectivity in stable vs. disturbed conditions
High connectivity is usually linked with high dispersal, generally a positive characteristic in a stable metapopulation. However, high dispersal might not always be a good thing, especially when ecosystems switch between stable and disturbed states, [...]