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 need to know whether current conservation sites will still be useful in the future. In their recent paper in Biological Conservation, Scriven et al. use Borneo as a model system to examine whether current protected areas will continue to support biodiversity as ranges shift, in particular up elevational gradients. Their findings emphasize a few key facts about connectivity in Borneo that likely apply to other protected area networks, particularly in tropical regions:
- Well over half of all protected areas were in low-lying areas that lacked the topographic diversity to retain analogous climatic conditions in the future.
- Protected areas in lower elevations are not well connected to existing protected areas in higher elevations, particularly for poor dispersers, and this remains true regardless of whether a high or low warming scenario was used.
- Most low-elevation protected areas were too isolated from existing forest corridors or stepping stones to be effectively linked to cool, high-elevation protected areas.
Low elevation protected areas in Borneo, tend to have high rates of species diversity and endemism, but also remain the most isolated and most impacted by human development. Poor dispersers in particular will have difficulty moving to high elevation protected areas as temperatures shift, and many may find little suitable habitat remaining in their own low elevation region. The authors suggest that maintaining connectivity between protected areas across the elevational gradient through focused management and creation of forest corridors should be a conservation priority. Their results highlight how many tropical protected areas in general are likely to suffer a loss of biodiversity unless more effort is made to connect across the elevational gradient.
Resources
Scriven, S. A., J. A. Hodgson, C. J. McClean, and J. K. Hill. 2015. Protected areas in Borneo may fail to conserve tropical forest biodiversity under climate change. Biological Conservation 184: 414-423.
