Williams-Climate-change-refugia-for-terrestrial-biodiversity_0

ABSTRACT
We are currently facing the likelihood of severe climate change before the close of the
century. In the face of such a global driver of species loss, we urgently need to identify
refugia that will shelter species from the worst impacts of climate change. This will be
a critical component of successful conservation and management of our biodiversity.
Despite this, little is known about how best to identify refugia in the landscape, and the
practical strategies needed to identify, protect and expand refugia are just beginning to
be developed. Identifying refugia that will protect most species, or large numbers of
species, remains a complex and daunting endeavour due to the large variations in
climatic and biotic requirements of species.
A first step to identifying refugia for biodiversity across Australia is to locate the areas
which show the least change into the future (i.e. the most environmentally stable),
particularly along axes of temperature and precipitation. The second and crucial step is
to identify the areas that will retain most of their biodiversity and provide opportunities
for additional species to relocate to into the future. Using these approaches in this
project, we take the first steps to identify refugial areas across the Australian continent
under contemporary climate change scenarios. We find that the southern and eastern
parts of the continent contain refugia that many species will retreat to over the next 75
years, but that the current reserve system may be inadequate to allow species to shift
to and persist in these areas. Disturbingly, we also find that there is a large portion of
the Australian vertebrate community for which adequate natural refugia do not appear
to exist. Fine-scaled regional analyses will be required to clarify these broad findings,
and we examine a number of case studies demonstrating how these regional analyses
might best proceed.
Lessons learnt across the multiple techniques employed in this study include:
1. High elevation areas are important refugia.
2. Tasmania and the east coast of mainland Australia contain most of the key
areas for refugia into the future.
3. Results are dependent on which objectives, techniques, taxonomic groups and
climate scenarios are used.
Climate change refugia for terrestrial biodiversity 1