The broad physical and biological principles behind climate change and its potential large scale ecological impacts on biota are fairly well understood, although likely responses of biotic communities at fine spatio-temporal scales are not, limiting the ability of conservation programs to respond effectively to climate change outside the range of human experience. Much of the climate debate has focused on attempts to resolve key uncertainties in a hypothesis-testing framework. However, conservation decisions cannot await resolution of these scientific issues and instead must proceed in the face of uncertainty. We suggest that conservation should precede in an adaptive management framework, in which decisions are guided by predictions under multiple, plausible hypotheses about climate impacts. Under this plan, monitoring is used to evaluate the response of the system to climate drivers, and management actions (perhaps experimental) are used to confront testable predictions with data, in turn providing feedback for future decision making. We illustrate these principles with the problem of mitigating the effects of climate change on terrestrial bird communities in the southern Appalachian Mountains, USA.
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Development of strategic conservation of imperiled species faces several large challenges, including uncertainty in species response to management actions, budgetary constraints that limit options, and issues with scaling expected conservation benefits from local to landscape levels and from single to multiple species. We used a structured decision making process and a multi-scale approach to identify a cost-effective conservation strategy for the imperiled aquatic species in the Upper Tennessee River Basin (UTRB), which face a variety of threats. The UTRB, which encompasses a landscape of 22,360 square miles primarily in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, harbors one of the most globally diverse assemblages of freshwater fishes and mussels occurring at temperate latitudes. In developing the strategy, we sought to identify which management actions to emphasize to best achieve recovery of imperiled aquatic species, given costs and uncertainty in management effectiveness. The strategy was developed for conservation implementation over a 20-year period, with periodic review and revision. In this presentation, we describe the ecological significance of the UTRB, the planning process, and the resulting strategy. A strategic emphasis on population management emerged as the optimal approach for achieving conservation of imperiled aquatic species in the UTRB, which aligns well with the goals of existing plans for conserving and recovering imperiled fishes and mussels in the UTRB. The structured planning process and resulting conservation strategy dovetail with the landscape approach to conservation embodied in the USFWS’s strategic habitat conservation approach and network of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives.
The recorded webinar is also available for viewing at the following link: http://www.fws.gov/northeast/science/seminars/July2015.html.
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