Climate Change Conscious Systematic Conservation Planning: A case study in the Wild Harts Study Area, Peace River Break, British Columbia December, 2019 Jerrica Mann, MSc Ian Curtis, MSc Pamela A. Wright, Ph.D. University of Northern British Columbia 1 Contents Study Background ......................................................................................................................................... 3 Overview of the Peace River Break ........................................................................................................... 8 Historical and Projected Climates in the PRB ......................................................................................... 10 Research Purpose ................................................................................................................................... 14 Methods ...................................................................................................................................................... 15 Step 1. Select, Compile and Develop Conservation Feature Data .......................................................... 17 Step 2. Analyze Anthropogenic Disturbance in the Study Area .............................................................. 19 Step 3. Use Gnarly Landscape Utilities and Linkage Mapper to Quantify Landscape Permeability and Identify Important Corridors for Connectivity ........................................................................................ 20 Step 4: Identify conservation goals for the PRB...................................................................................... 22 Step 5: Review Existing Protected Areas in the WHSA ........................................................................... 22 Step 6: Use MARXAN with ILP to Generate a Portfolio of Additional Protected Areas .......................... 23 Step 7: Perform a Comparative Analysis between the Climate Change Conscious SCP Proposed Protected Areas Network and a Proposed Protected Areas Network Created Using Traditional Static SCP Methods ........................................................................................................................................... 28 Step 8: Analyze Conservation Feature Complementarity and Resultant Representativeness ............... 28 Results ......................................................................................................................................................... 29 Coarse-filter Conservation Features ....................................................................................................... 29 Fine-filter Conservation Features ........................................................................................................... 37 Climate Change Conservation Features .................................................................................................. 43 Backward Velocity Refugia .................................................................................................................. 43 Novel Climates .................................................................................................................................... 45 Disappearing Climates / Biotic Refugia ............................................................................................... 49 Climate Change and Connectivity as Supplemental Planning Information ........................................ 50 Landscape Resistance and Connectivity ............................................................................................. 53 Cost Surface ........................................................................................................................................ 56 MARXAN-ILP Scenario Outputs ............................................................................................................... 58 Scenario A - Current Conservation Features ....................................................................................... 58 Scenario B - Future Conservation Features ........................................................................................ 61 Scenario C – Current and Future Conservation Features ................................................................... 63 Scenario Comparison .............................................................................................................................. 66 References .................................................................................................................................................. 69 2 Study Background As humans transform the biosphere in unprecedented ways and rates, loss of biodiversity is one of the planet’s prevailing environmental challenges. Worldwide, the rapidly-expanding human footprint threatens the persistence of wilderness areas that serve as refuges for species and ecosystems. Furthermore, human induced climate change perturbs regional precipitation patterns and temperature regimes, thereby altering ecosystem composition, structure, and function, forcing species to quickly adapt to new environmental conditions, migrate, or perish. Against this backdrop, protected areas play a critical role in the long-term conservation of biodiversity by ensuring the persistence of wilderness areas that sustain species and ecosystems. Consequently, establishing protected area networks has been the cornerstone of global biodiversity conservation efforts. Now more than ever, pre-emptive systematic conservation planning is required to combat the novel challenges of unprecedented anthropogenic pressures in a future characterized by unpredictable climate conditions. Three quarters of the planet’s terrestrial areas have already been altered by anthropogenic activities (Venter et al., 2016) to the point that they can no longer be considered natural (Watson et al., 2016). Between 2.8 and 3.0 million km2 of the planet’s wilderness is projected to be lost by 2030 (Venter, Watson, Atkinson and Marco, in press). This would result in a total of 5.6-5.8 million km2 of wilderness lost since 1993: an alarming ~15% loss in less than 40 years. Even in areas such as North America where the threat of wilderness loss is much lower, a large projected loss is anticipated in the region by 2030 (0.21 – 0.22 million km2) (Venter, Watson, Atkinson and Marco, in press). Globally, wilderness conversion exceeds protection by a ratio of 8:1 in temperate grasslands and Mediterranean biomes, and 10:1 in more than 140 ecoregions (Hoekstra, Boucher, Ricketts, & Roberts, 2005). Human impacts on the natural environment have reached such proportions that the term “biome crisis” has been coined to describe the emergence of substantial and widespread disparities between habitat loss and protection across ecoregions and, at a global scale, across entire biomes (Hoekstra et al., 2005). In addition to the rapid conversion of our planet’s wilderness areas, the long-term impacts of climate change pose a significant threat to biodiversity that is challenging to predict. Anthropogenically-driven climate change has already begun to impact critical climate regions and is now recognized to be one of the most serious threats to biodiversity and the conservation thereof (Lemieux, Beechey, Scott, & Gray, 2011). Climate change induced by human-generated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is now implicated in a myriad of coincident impacts. These include disturbances in regional precipitation patterns and temperature regimes, sea level rise, severe weather events, and changes in ecosystem composition, structure, and function (IPCC 2007a, 2007b; Lemmen et al. 2008). 3 Global climate change is proceeding at unprecedented rates and further unparalleled climatic changes are expected for the 21st century (IPCC 2007a, 2007b). An increase in carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere has increased the average global surface temperature by approximately 1.1 ºC since the late 19th century (GISTEMP Team, 2017; Hansen, Sato & Lo, 2010). Most of the warming occurred within the last 35 years, with 16 of the 17 warmest years on record occurring since 2001. Not only was 2016 the third year in a row to set a new record for global average surface temperatures, making it the warmest year on record, but eight of the 12 months that made up the year (January through September with the exception of June) were the warmest on record for those respective months (GISTEMP Team, 2017; Hansen, Sato & Lo, 2010). Within Canada, warming rates have increased at nearly double the global average (Environment & Climate Change Canada, 2016). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007b) has suggested that approximately 20– 30% of the planet’s species are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average temperatures exceed 1.5–2.5ºC. Of concern, these estimates may be optimistic when the synergistic effects of habitat fragmentation and climate change are considered. Rapidly declining rates of biodiversity resulting from such synergistic effects have led to discussions of an impending sixth major mass extinction analogous to the five previously documented (Pimm et al., 2014). Scientists estimate the planet is already losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate (Chivian & Bernstein, 2008) with as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species possibly heading toward extinction by mid-century (Thomas et al., 2004). According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN, 2017) Red List of threatened and endangered