Little doubt remains among scientists that humans are changing the global climate system and that these changes will have far-reaching and fundamental impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity. These impacts necessitate a consideration of how we should adapt our conservation and management actions to address species and ecosystem persistence in light of rapidly changing climate. Many of the most commonly recommended climate change adaptation strategies for biodiversity management and conservation advocate for a larger-scale and longer-term perspective on conservation planning and action. Adaptation strategies related to reserve design and enhancing connectivity are explicitly landscape-scale, but even individual site-based management decisions may need to be considered in a larger regional context to ensure their effectiveness. While all these strategies will play some role in conservation as climate changes, specific on-the-ground actions will vary among particular ecosystems, depending on the regional climate, ecology, and political context. Therefore, managers and conservationists need tools to transform the growing menu of broad recommendations into practical site-specific actions that can be implemented.
Results/Conclusions
I will discuss several challenges with integrating climate change science into adaptation planning and action at a landscape scale, including interpreting climate change science, making decisions under uncertainty, and framing conservation goals and objectives in light of climate change. One way to address these challenges is to take an iterative approach to climate change adaptation planning and action that takes into account the best available science, but recognizes the need to revisit and adjust adaptation actions in response to monitored changes and updated scientific information. Preliminary lessons learned from efforts to incorporate climate change into conservation decision-making at several sites across North America will be discussed. By looking across landscapes, we can begin to understand the similarities and dissimilarities of climate change-informed conservation across diverse geographies. This theme will be continued throughout the organized session as several case studies are presented of how conservation planning and action in specific landscapes and seascapes across the globe are being adapted to the challenge of climate change.
