Can Protected Areas and Existing Institutional Arrangements Conserve Biodiversity as Species Ranges Shift?
Paul Armsworth
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee
Abstract: Climate and land use change, in tandem with other global changes, will render biodiversity increasingly dynamic in coming decades. Species ranges will shift, new communities form and ecosystem functions be transformed. All of these changes challenge existing conservation approaches and institutions to adapt. Using the central and southern Appalachian mountains in the US, a region rich in biodiversity, as an example, we explore future changes to biodiversity and how well conservation initiatives are prepared to cope. We modeled future range shifts of forest dependent vertebrates of conservation concern in coming decades when also accounting for dispersal limitation and land use change, testing the sensitivity of our predictions to different assumptions. We compared predicted biodiversity patterns to existing and proposed protected areas and to current conservation institutions. For the latter, we focused on the role of U.S. states that lead on many conservation activities but have territorialized footprints covering only a portion of the relevant spatial domain. Thus, states will have to cooperate and trade management responsibilities if they are to conserve species effectively. We conducted semi-structured interviews and designed a serious game to explore state and other conservation actors for the kinds of cooperation and coordination this will require. We integrated the findings into novel optimization approaches that seek to account better for the role of conservation institutions. Results from our work contributed to wildlife action plans currently being developed by multiple states across the Southeastern United States.
