Integrating functional connectivity in designing networks of protected areas under climate change: A caribou case-study

Identifying ecological corridors for the Chinese ecological conservation redline

Due to the fragmentation of protected areas (PA), it is important to build ecological corridors in order to connect scattered PA and form protection networks for biodiversity conservation. We take the Chinese ecological conservation redline (ECR) as an example to study the construction of ecological corridors. China has defined ECR to improve the system of PA in key ecological functional zones, nature reserves, and areas of sensitive and fragile ecological environment. In this study, 187 core areas of ECR were identified using ArcGIS masking and dissolving technology to build corridors, covering 95% of the total ECR areas. Using the Linkage Mapper tool and the Pinchpoint Mapper, we identified 454 ecological corridors 68,794 km long. The results of the line density analysis showed that there are 9 key regional biological corridors connected to the ECR at the national scale, which must focus on protecting and strengthening ecological construction during the implementation of ecological conservation redline policy. Our study will provide references for developing a regional pattern of ecological security, territorial spatial planning, and will promote the implementation of biodiversity conservation policies.

Assessing Pathways of Climate Change Effects in SpaDES: An Application to Boreal Landbirds of Northwest Territories Canada

Distributions of landbirds in Canadian northern forests are expected to be affected by climate change, but it remains unclear which pathways are responsible for projected climate effects. Determining whether climate change acts indirectly through changing fire regimes and/or vegetation dynamics, or directly through changes in climatic suitability may allow land managers to address negative trajectories via forest management. We used SpaDES, a novel toolkit built in R that facilitates the implementation of simulation models from different areas of knowledge to develop a simulation experiment for a study area comprising 50 million ha in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Our factorial experiment was designed to contrast climate effects pathways on 64 landbird species using climate-sensitive and non-climate sensitive models for tree growth and mortality, wildfire, and landbirds. Climate-change effects were predicted to increase suitable habitat for 73% of species, resulting in average net gain of 7.49 million ha across species. We observed higher species turnover in the northeastern, south-central (species loss), and western regions (species gain). Importantly, we found that most of the predicted differences in net area of occupancy across models were attributed to direct climate effects rather than simulated vegetation change, despite a similar relative importance of vegetation and climate variables in landbird models. Even with close to a doubling of annual area burned by 2100, and a 600 kg/ha increase in aboveground tree biomass predicted in this region, differences in landbird net occupancy across models attributed to climate-driven forest growth were very small, likely resulting from differences in the pace of vegetation and climate changes, or vegetation lags. The effect of vegetation lags (i.e., differences from climatic equilibrium) varied across species, resulting in a wide range of changes in landbird distribution, and consequently predicted occupancy, due to climate effects. These findings suggest that hybrid approaches using statistical models and landscape simulation tools could improve wildlife forecasts when future uncoupling of vegetation and climate is anticipated. This study lays some of the methodological groundwork for ecological adaptive management using the new platform SpaDES, which allows for iterative forecasting, mixing of modeling paradigms, and tightening connections between data, parameterization, and simulation.