Prioritizing Areas for Habitat Conservation in the Face of Climate and Land-Use Change

Abstract

The selection of sites for biodiversity conservation is best done if it anticipates future challenges and efficiently accomplishes targets, given limited funding for such efforts. The first chapter of this thesis discusses how conservation practitioners might manage and enhance long-term survival for species whose ranges must shift as climate changes, across regions that present significant mobility barriers. I describe recommendations highlighting connectivity, refugia from climate change, adaptation, and restoration within agricultural landscapes in North America, but these recommendations are transferable elsewhere. The second chapter examines patterns of change in agricultural intensity and land price within Canada’s species-rich farmland between 1986 and 2011, and creates sequential cost-efficient plans to conserve resident species-at-risk within that time period, to determine how environmental and cost changes erode the efficiency of conservation plans. While sites initially selected as cost-efficient remained so through time, total plan costs increased, decreasing each plan’s ability to represent all species for a given budget. This emphasizes the urgent need for conservation within Canada’s farmland.