Refugia from Climate Change: Emerging Concepts and Applications

Abstract:

As climate change accelerates threats to biodiversity, an emerging adaptation strategy focuses on climate-change refugia: areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change over time that enable persistence of valued physical, ecological, and sociocultural resources. This presentation highlights recent advances in identifying and understanding refugia: how they arise, where and for how long they will persist, and what roles they may play in ecosystems over time. Through the Department of the Interior’s Climate Adaptation Science Center (CASC) network, scientists and natural-resource managers have used co-production approaches to identify refugia from local to continental scales. Examples of recent studies include efforts to identify locations protected from stand-replacing fire in old-growth forests, to quantify drivers of vegetation resistance to insect outbreaks, and to evaluate wetlands that could function as hydrologic refugia from intensifying droughts. The Refugia Research Coalition (climaterefugia.org) has brought managers and researchers together in multiple CASC regions throughout the United States to advance the science of refugia in ecosystems ranging from montane meadows to river networks to dry conifer forests. Collectively, these diverse efforts are informing new approaches for managing landscapes and conserving threatened and endangered species under rapidly changing environmental conditions.