Speaker
Description
Recent climatic changes have already impacted biodiversity, but estimates of the percent of species threatened with extinction by 2100 range from 1% to 80%. This uncertainty stems partly from differences among algorithms used to estimate species' current and future projected ranges, and from differences among modeled projections of future climate. There is little agreement as to which species' distribution model or which climate model is "best", leaving conservation planners often lost in a sea of possible futures from which to choose a management pathway. Here, we used a Robust Decision Making (RDM) approach to look across a wide range of possible futures and identify robust conservation strategies for 20 different species of concern. We estimate the distribution of potential habitat for each species (both now and in the furture) using multiple Species Distribution Models (SDMs), with multiple sets of modeling parameters and GCM-RCM combinations, resulting in ~400-700 potential futures per species. We then analyse five different conservation strategies for their reliability and potential for regrets. We ultimately seek the most robust decision pathways, given known uncertainties. We found that (i) Climate change considerably affects the future distribution of all the species; (ii) There is considerable variation in the spatial distribution of each species amongst possible futures; (iii) Current state of understanding is not sufficient to estimate which of these futures is most likely; (iv) RDM approaches are helpful in navigating these uncertainties to identify robust management pathways for species conservation. The study offers a innovative conceptual framework that could be adapted to specific circumstances to produce actionable biodiversity conservation plans that are robust to highly uncertain climate futures.