Land use modifies potential climate change adaptation strategies and opportunities in the Rocky Mountains

Background/Question/Methods

Increasingly, scientists are concerned about the robustness of conservation strategies to climate change. As maintenance and restoration of landscape connectivity has emerged as a key adaptation strategy, it is crucial to better understand how land use affects connectivity and the potential for adaptation. To this end, I examined how current and likely future land use change has affected the landscape connectivity of natural landscapes in the conterminous US. Data on natural landscapes are generated from land cover types, housing density, presence of transportation networks (roads and railways), and road use (traffic volume). As a preliminary examination of the potential for natural land cover linkages and riparian areas to facilitate adaptation to a changing climate, I calculated the direction and velocity of movement necessary to maintain the same temperature expected from decadal shifts in climate for A1B and B2 scenarios, and then compared the results of these scenarios to identify the patterns and trends of where land use might constrain possible adaptation to climate change.

Results/Conclusions

I found that highly-connected pathways (as measured by betweeness centrality) intersected proposed energy corridors in the Rocky Mountains at roughly 75 locations and intersected 90-95 moderate to heavily used highways (10⁴-10⁶ vehicles per day).  About 15% of the highly-connected locations are currently secured by protected lands, but 28% of these occur on public lands that permit resource extraction, and the remaining 57% are unprotected.