Adapting landscapes for biodiversity responses to climate change

Proposed by Paul Opdam, Wageningen University, The Netherlands, paul.opdam@wur.nl

What is the problem?
The challenge faced in biodiversity conservation is a clear example how climate change will disrupt our current paradigms. If species distribution patterns shift across continents, and weather extremes aggravate the effects of habitat fragmentation on plant and animal populations, what can be done to prevent further loss of biodiversity in ecosystems? Vos et al (2008) suggested two spatial adaptation strategies: (1) to increase the connectivity between ecosystem networks on a large spatial scale, and (2) to increase the area and density of ecosystem networks in regions where dispersal sources are small and widely dispersed.
Implementing large scale adaptation measures are urgent because their development will take a long time and effects are already reported. Because our knowledge is very much imperfect, spatial adaptation is working in uncertainty. Identifying bottlenecks in the spatial cohesion of ecosystem patterns is one thing, ranking them according to urgency of spatial adaptation is another, and finding adaptation measures that can be implemented in the specific context of different regions is a third major challenge. In the absence of a top-down spatial planning policy, it will be extremely interesting to find cost-effective adaptation measures consistently across a large spatial scale

Challenges to the science of landscape ecology:

• Identify a methodology for implementing adaptation strategies at different levels of spatial scale.
• Identifying regions where improvement of connectivity is most urgent or beneficial.
• Identify ecosystem types that have highest priority, for example because of their vulnerability to fragmentation.
• Identify opportunities: for example wetland restoration may contribute to preventing flooding after extreme rainfall and to the avoidance of summer drought damage in agricultural crops.
• Develop planning tools to help coordinate local planning to get spatial cohesion of ecosystem patterns across wide spatial ranges.