A survey to evaluate managed relocation as an adaptation strategy

Background/Question/Methods

The decision over whether and how to implement climate change adaptation strategies like managed relocation (MR) depend, in part, on our ability to identify potential risks and benefits based on basic ecological principles. Paleoecologists and invasive species ecologists both study the shifting distributions of species in space and time and each have highlighted from their fields sets of conservation lessons relevant to MR. Although these perspectives share some common points, recommendations for management under changing climates from these two fields often are divergent, even contradictory.  Many paleoecologists emphasize the dominance of climatic control over the distribution and abundance of species, while invasive species ecologists emphasize species interactions (particularly trophic interactions) and a skepticism about the predictive power of climate envelope approaches. Such divergent recommendations pose a dilemma to conservation biologists considering implementation of MR. In fact, existing MR efforts emphasize either “mostly climate” or “mostly community” justifications for their protocols. Results/Conclusions
Here we jointly review the paleoecological and invasion biology literatures, identify points of common ground, note cases where apparent disagreement may be scale-dependent, and flag persistent discrepancies that require further study and reconciliation.