Planning corridors around climate change

Planning for connectivity often focuses on current climatic conditions and habitat classification, using a snapshot in time to devise a management plan for creating connected landscapes with corridors.  However, given the rate at which global temperatures are shifting and human development is projected to spread, these types of models may lose their usefulness in a short amount of time if they don’t account for these changing conditions.  Incorporating climate change shifts and projected land-use patterns into corridor planning can add an extra dimension that will ensure models continue to be relevant in the future regardless of how or to what degree these changes occur.  This then allows scientists and managers to facilitate range shifts in a way that is biologically meaningful for multiple species adapting to future climatic conditions.

In their new paper, Tristan Nuñez and colleagues use the Pacific northwest as a template for designing corridors that incorporate future shifts in temperature and land use.  Instead of focusing on species-specific or habitat-specific models, they base their models on temperature and naturalness of the landscape (“landscape integrity”) and plan around these gradients.  For example, they assume that a mountaintop species is more likely to move through a corridor that follows a cooler ridge rather than drop through a warmer valley to reach another peak, even if the distance through the valley is shorter.  By using these principles to delineate corridors in the region, they develop a new modeling tool that takes into account natural linkages and future shifts in climate gradients.  Their methods have been implemented as the Climate Linkage Mapper software tool, which is a new addition to the Linkage Mapper Toolkit for ArcGIS.