Conservation Planning with Uncertain Climate Change Projections

Heini Kujala1., Atte Moilanen1, Miguel B. Arau´ jo2,3,4, Mar Cabeza1*. 1 Metapopulation Research Group, Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, 2 Department of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, National Museum of Natural Sciences, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı´ficas, Madrid, Spain, 3 ‘Rui Nabeiro’ Biodiversity Chair, Centro de Investigac¸a˜o em Biodiversidade e Recursos Gene´ticos, University of E´vora, E´vora, Portugal, 4 Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract Climate change is affecting biodiversity worldwide, but conservation responses are constrained by considerable uncertainty regarding the magnitude, rate and ecological consequences of expected climate change. Here we propose a framework to account for several sources of uncertainty in conservation prioritization. Within this framework we account for uncertainties arising from (i) distributions that shift following climate change, (ii) basic connectivity requirements of species, (iii) alternative climate change scenarios and their impacts, (iv) in the modelling of species distributions, and (v) different levels of confidence about present and future. When future impacts of climate change are uncertain, robustness of decision- making can be improved by quantifying the risks and trade-offs associated with climate scenarios. Sensible prioritization that accounts simultaneously for the present and potential future distributions of species is achievable without overly jeopardising present-day conservation values. Doing so requires systematic treatment of uncertainties and testing of the sensitivity of results to assumptions about climate. We illustrate the proposed framework by identifying priority areas for amphibians and in Europe.

Citation: Kujala H, Moilanen A, Arau´jo MB, Cabeza M (2013) Conservation Planning with Uncertain Climate Change Projections. PLoS ONE 8(2): e53315. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0053315 Editor: Nicolas Mouquet, CNRS, University of Montpellier II, France Received March 15, 2012; Accepted November 30, 2012; Published February 6, 2013 Copyright: ß 2013 Kujala et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: For financial support HK and AM thank the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence Programme 2006–2011, grants 213457 and 129636 (URL: http:// www.aka.fi/en-GB/A/Centres-of-Excellence-/). HK was also funded by a Luonnonvaraisten elio¨iden kesta¨va¨nka¨yto¨n ja suojelun tutkijakoulu Graduate School fellowship (URL: http://www.helsinki.fi/luova) and by Finnish Cultural Foundation, grant SKR-00070832 (URL: http://www.skr.fi). AM acknowledges the support by the ERC-StG (European Research Council Starting Grant, URL: http://erc.europa.eu/starting-grants) project Global Environmental Decision Analysis (GEDA), grant 260393. MC and MBA were funded by the European Commission Seventh Framework Program project European RESPONSES to climate change (grant agreement number 244092, URL: http://www.responsesproject.eu/). MBA also acknowledges the Spanish Research Council (URL: http://www.csic.es/web/guest/home), the ‘Rui Nabeiro’ Biodiversity Chair (URL: http://www.catedra.uevora.pt/rui-nabeiro/), and the Danish National Research Foundation (URL: http://www.dg.dk/en/) for support of his research. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: [email protected] . These authors contributed equally to this work.

Introduction with respect to new threats [1