Climate is changing in response to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. From an initial anthropocentric perspective, one or two degrees seems like a small change from historic temperatures, but from an ecocentric perspective, one or two degrees can result in tremendous shifts leading to large landscape scale changes, which means conservation practices will require a stronger emphasis on large landscape approaches to conservation.
If large landscape scale changes increase risk, or the likelihood of impairment of ecosystems in a variety of ways, those effects will be felt broadly to varying degrees across the system, depending on its relative health across its reach. The longer timeframe and unplanned nature of human settlement in the Southeast has led to a vastly fragmented landscape dotted by public lands. If managers at Parks, Forests, and Reserves make all the right decisions about how to adapt to climate change, those lands could become refugia for sensitive species, but a better outcome is for managed land units to serve as pillars in an adapted landscape. In order for this to become a reality, conservation professionals working in the Southeast must work together both on public and surrounding private lands so that the whole ecosystem maintains its integrity under a changing climate. That means professionals working for different organizations must identify shared needs and collaborate in their actions. To mobilize the conservation community to rise to this challenge, the Department of the Interior established Landscape Conservation Cooperatives that are working to develop large landscape conservation strategies, facilitate collaborative conservation, and fund the needed science to make key conservation decisions and communicate all of this back out to their members.
Results/Conclusions
The National Park Service has engaged in landscape conservation cooperatives because, under a changing climate, in order to achieve their preservation mission, achievement of the Landscape Conservation Cooperative’s mission will be key. Working to adapt at the large landscape scale is important, but at the same time, changes are already happening in Parks across the Southeast, so two concurrent processes are underway: local scale adaptations within Parks, and large landscape scale adaptations through LCCs. This study provides examples of how both entities are adapting, describes ways the efforts of the two entities are interrelated, and identifies future local/large landscape adaptation needs.