Creating linkages that help species adapt to future climate conditions is a key strategy to maintain biodiversity. There are a multitude of approaches to modeling and mapping climate-wise connectivity, many of which have specific recommendations such as the use of riparian corridors and wide corridors to facilitate movement. These approaches can be broadly categorized into several classes, such as those that use projected future ranges, those that rely on climate analogs, those use existing environmental and climatic gradients, and those that rely on connecting a diversity of enduring geophysical features.
Schloss, C.A., Cameron, D.R., McRae, B.H., Theobald, D.M. and Jones, A. 2021. “No‐regrets” pathways for navigating climate change: planning for connectivity with land use, topography, and climate. Ecological Applications: e02468.
Using these modeling approaches to create a cohesive framework that connects connectivity modeling and on-the-ground implementation remains a challenge. There are numerous tools to incorporate climate change into models, but less guidance on translating modeling results into conservation action. Recent work has attempted to bridge this gap by providing a “no-regrets” method for connecting natural lands in the present climate and those with future analogous climates.
Using the state of California as a case study, future climate linkages were modeled using three inputs: present-day land use, topographic diversity (as a proxy for microclimate diversity), and climate projection models. These were fed into Omniscape, an open-source program that uses circuit theory to produce maps of omni-directional habitat connectivity, in order to identify climate linkages and areas that were generally critical to species movement or flow across the entire state. The coarse-filter approach addresses both broad scale and fine scale drivers, as well as accounts for multi-generational species shifts across time.
The model outputs provide a framework for thinking about how to model climate change and connectivity. In this case, the framework enables a better understanding of how the entire landscape contributes to both present-day connectivity and future connectivity. In landscapes already modified by land use, the last remaining present-day linkages were also the most important climate linkages, highlighting how important it is to protect them. In unfragmented landscapes where multiple potential linkages still exist, the climate linkages that were identified can help guide conservation decisions about where to protect land for the future. By combining topography, land use, and climate change projections into a single connectivity model parameterization, it can act as a template for other analyses in creating optimal climate connectivity.
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