Landscape connectivity and recovery from disturbance: understanding where and when to implement climate-change adaptation strategies

Abstract

As the planet warms, conservation planners and natural resource managers are seeking ways to help species and ecosystems adapt to climatic changes and shifting disturbance regimes. For example, enhancing landscape connectivity may support species’ movements to track suitable climatic conditions, and promoting regeneration after disturbance (e.g., wildfire) may ensure robust system recovery. But understanding where and when to implement these climate-change adaptation strategies requires a nuanced understanding of how species and ecosystems respond to climatic variability in time and space. In my dissertation, I address this need through two major projects, complementing each research effort with a conceptual review of the state of the science and future frontiers. First, I mapped key areas likely to facilitate climate-driven species’ movements across western North America by linking historic and future climate analogs. My results suggest that not including climate projections in connectivity models (i.e., basing connectivity solely on human modification of the landscape) or simplifying the temporal resolution of climatic changes may overestimate species movement and miss critical pathways. Second, I examined how contemporary climatic variability constrains post-fire recovery a decade after stand-replacing wildfire on the eastern slopes of the North Cascades. Juvenile conifer establishment and growth patterns reflected the convergence of ecological, physiographic, and climatic influences operating at multiple spatial and temporal scales, but adequate seed delivery and benign post-fire climatic conditions were key factors in ensuring relatively robust recovery across topographic settings. However, these facilitative factors may diminish as climate change unfolds. Both of these projects—modeling connectivity for climate-driven movements and uncovering the spatio-temporal patterns of post-fire recovery—may help planners and managers to prioritize where and when to implement climate-change adaptation strategies in an uncertain future.