Climate change poses a significant threat to biodiversity. Increasing the number and size of protected areas is one of the most frequently cited approaches to addressing this threat. However, because climate change is already shifting species distributions, traditional reserve selection strategies that rely on current patterns of biodiversity may be ineffective. One commonly suggested alternative is to protect geophysical diversity, or the various edaphic, topographic, and geographic features of a landscape, because it is not expected to be significantly altered by climate change in the near future. As the climate continues to drive changes in species distributions, geophysically diverse landscapes may have the potential to provide the habitat heterogeneity needed to facilitate biological movement and adaptation. Here, we compare the effectiveness of reserve networks based on geophysical diversity and reserve networks based on today's biological diversity at protecting 600 western North American plant and animal species distributions under 12 future climatic scenarios.
Results/Conclusions
Our preliminary results indicate that reserve networks based on current patterns of biodiversity protect more species across all climate scenarios. We also found that rarer species can benefit from both reserve network design strategies depending on the severity of the climate scenario. Finally, we found that landscapes identified in both geophysical and biological reserve networks are particularly valuable for conservation planning.