Strengthening the foundation of conservation: Building the Protected Areas Database, the LCC conservation atlases and delivering CSC climate change projections

Background/Question/Methods: The protected areas network play a fundamental role in regional conservation and climate change is believed to be one of the greatest threats to these natural landscapes and a cross-cutting theme that impacts all Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs). But are all protected areas equally threatened by a changing climate? What are the most likely climate-related stressors for these important places? Is it a change in hydrologic regime, transition to different vegetation types, or some combination of factors? Are some protected areas more or less vulnerable than other ones based on their soil characteristics and potential for containing climate refugia?  To answer these questions this project has integrated a variety of updated climate change datasets from the World Climate Research Programme's Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) with the current protected areas database (PAD-US CBI Edition Version 2) and created a new visualization tool on the existing powerful online conservation mapping system (Data Basin) that allows resource managers and others to obtain a much better understanding of how projected climate change is likely to impact the integrity of the protected areas network, so that they may plan and manage decisions regarding protected areas at both the landscape and site scale.

Results/Conclusions: The resulting data are accessed using a tool that resides in Data Basin and any associated LCC Gateways, were users can conduct a variety of different queries of this large data integration and produce information that is both rich and actionable. These data include a time component (historic to 100 years into the future) with an annual time step. The design of this user interface was built with input from regional managers to assure that the tool provides useful insights that allows for the planning of short, medium, and long-term adaptation strategies.