Relocation of climate zones in global terrestrial protected areas

Keywords: Protected areas, climate velocity, biodiversity redistributions, climate zone changes, Köppen-Geiger climate classification
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 47

Abstract

Under global warming, large portions of the Earth’s surface are expected to experience changes of climate zones, driving the redistribution of biodiversity. The anthropogenic climate changes may greatly threaten biodiversity and undermine the effectiveness of protected area (PA) systems. Most assessments of the impact of climate change on biodiversity relied on simple climatic indicators, which depict local temporal changes in climate. To represent the spatial shifts of climatic conditions and approximate the shifts in species distributions, previous studies increasingly used climate velocity, providing a simple and intuitive measure of threats to biodiversity posed by climate change. Current climate velocity measures are solely based on statistically combined temperature and precipitation indices, and lack in biological information. The Köppen climate classification scheme provides a more ecologically relevant way to characterize bioclimatic conditions, thus can be a new direction to develop climate velocity metrics. Using the 1-km dataset of present and future Köppen-Geiger climate maps for 1979-2100 (KGClim), we presented and estimated a new analytical measure of climate-type velocity to enhance the utility of the climate velocity metric in biodiversity conservation. We assessed the relocation of climate zones within the world’s terrestrial PA network by quantifying the speed, direction, and timing of the climate zone relocations and categorizing the relocation patterns within the PA network. In addition, we examined the correlations of the climate zone relocation and climate-type velocity measures with the PA attributes and evaluated the PA vulnerability, to inform biodiversity conservation and PA management under a changing climate.