An increasing challenge for conservation planning is designing connected landscapes that remain effective as climate change reshapes where species can persist and move. Traditional corridor and reserve planning often assumes relatively stable environmental conditions, yet rapid climatic shifts are altering habitat suitability, disturbance regimes, and movement pathways. Conservation plans are more likely to succeed when they emphasize sustaining connections among areas that are likely to remain suitable, or become newly suitable, under future climates.
Stralberg, D., Lewis, D.W., Stolar, J., et al. 2025. Integrating climate‐change exposure and refugia into landscape planning: A practical guide. Conservation Science and Practice 8(1): e70171. DOI: 10.1111/csp2.70171
Recent research responds to this gap by offering a climate-informed framework that explicitly integrates climate exposure and refugia into landscape planning. Its key contribution is a practical, step by step guide that links refugia concepts to real world land use decisions, rather than treating them as abstract conservation priorities. By combining climate change exposure with landscape condition, the framework helps planners distinguish where resistance strategies are realistic, where transitions are inevitable, and where corridors and microrefugia become essential.
The authors outline a five step planning process. First, planners identify ecological, cultural, and resource values at risk and define desired future conditions. Second, they assess landscape capacity by combining measures of climate change exposure with conservation capacity, such as ecological integrity and human footprint. Third, they select management strategies that align with this capacity, ranging from resisting change in low exposure refugia to facilitating transitions in highly exposed areas. Fourth, they map priorities and translate them into land use zones using spatial products such as macrorefugia, microrefugia, and climate corridors. Finally, they emphasize monitoring and adaptive management to refine strategies as conditions change.
A case example from interior British Columbia demonstrates how this approach can reshape conservation strategies in a working landscape affected by wildfire, insects, and forestry. By aligning reserves, retention areas, and corridors with refugia and exposure patterns, planners were able to better support long term connectivity and resilience despite ongoing disturbance and development pressures.
Overall, the research provides a practical roadmap for integrating climate change into connectivity planning. Climate corridors remain critical tools for enabling species movement across fragmented and changing landscapes, particularly where exposure is high and future climate analogs are distant. Microrefugia can act as local anchors that can support persistence and act as stepping stones within broader networks. It reinforces the idea that effective corridors should anticipate future movement needs, not just current ones, and that conserving connected networks of refugia will be essential for biodiversity persistence in a rapidly changing climate.
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