Identification Of The Critical Areas For Biodiversity Conservation Under Climate Change

Ongoing climate change poses serious threats and challenges to biodiversity conservation in the future.One of the most effective approaches to address climate change is to identify and protect the most critical areas.Considering the shortcomings and challenges of traditional biodiversity conservation and the current urgent practical needs,conservation biology requires more theories and methods to identify the critical areas.Among the abiotic environmental factors,climate has the most direct and significant impacts on the distribution of species.This paper adopts the climate diversity and the connective climate velocity method to identify three types of critical areas in China,including the future critical areas,the stable climate areas and the sensitive climate areas.Finally,the existing protected-area system is applied to analyze the conservation status of these critical areas.This study aims to provide answers to the following research questions: 1)How do identify the critical areas with climate diversity and the connective climate velocity methods? 2)what characteristics do these critical areas have? 3)how stable are the spatial distribution of these critical areas on time scales? 4)What is the protection status of these critical areas in China?The main conclusions drawn from this study are as follows.1)The climate diversity and the connective climate velocity methods can be adopted to identify the critical areas which are characterized by higher climate diversity,lower extinction risk or stronger sheltered capacity.The spatial distribution of those critical areas identified by different methods overlaps and complements with each other,and the critical areas obtained by integrating methods have a higher protected value.2)In this paper,new connective climate velocity method is constructed,which combined the climate exposure,migration connectivity and path length together.And the new method could quantify the extinction risk of species and regional sheltered capacity more accurately.3)The middle elevation in mountainous regions have both lower extinction risk and higher sheltered capacity.The foothills regions are less sheltered while the extinction risk is lower.The mountaintop regions have better capacities in protecting neighboring species while the extinction risk is higher.4)The overlap areas of the future critical areas and the stable climate areas are remarkable,which are mainly distributed in areas such as the Hengduan mountains in southwest China,the southeast Tibet,the eastern margin of the western Sichuan plateau,and the Qinling-Daba mountains.Climate-sensitive areas are mainly distributed in Guangxi,Guizhou,Sichuan and Chongqing,and are relatively small areas and overlap little to the first two critical areas.All the three types of the critical areas are not adequately protected by the current protected-area system in China,thus corresponding protection strategies should be adopted for each critical area.This paper establishes a new connective climate velocity method to assess the extinction risk and regional sheltered capacity.According to the climate data of several periods,the three critical areas obtained by different methods are valuable for the protected-area system in China to address the climate change.In the future,multiple spatial scales in different regions,land use and cover change,different climate change scenarios et al.should be considered to improve the identifications of critical areas for biodiversity conservation to address the climate change.