Recommendations for conservation and future research

A variety of actions and continuing work will be required in order to try and limit the impacts of climate change on biodiversity. One major component of work that will be required is the ongoing and expanded monitoring of species distributions to ensure the impacts of climate change on biodiversity can be adequately recorded and addressed by conservation action. Accurate and geographically comprehensive distribution records are crucial to ensuring that projected species distributions models can perform well (Araújo & Guisan 2006) and be informative when used to guide conservation decision making, so ensuring existing monitoring schemes are maintained and new schemes established will be important.

Continuing development of species distribution modelling techniques will also be beneficial in improving our predictions of risk from climate change. This is an area of research that has been continually evolving for more than a

decade already (Guisan & Thuiller 2005; Araújo & Guisan 2006; Araújo & Peterson 2012), but improved model outputs and further validation of these outputs will make predictions of climate change risk more useful and more

129 likely to be utilized in conservation decision making processes. Advances in computing power and cluster computing becoming more widely available should help to make large scale species distribution modelling more accessible to a wider community of experts, but optimisation of code and modelling methods/techniques will still be required to ensure existing tools are useful and widely applicable to different regions and taxonomic groups. Climate change vulnerability assessments should be viewed as a continually developed and updated process; similar to how the IUCN Red List is

periodically reviewed and updated with new data as it becomes available. At present climate change vulnerability assessments are most commonly presented as one off, standalone pieces of work which can quickly become outdated and unusable for practical conservation purposes, and this is an issue that needs to be addressed. These assessments are designed to act as an early warning system for potential negative impacts of climate change on individual species, without regular updates to species distribution

modelling and exacerbating factor data they will not remain fit for purpose for very long.

There is a need to incorporate more taxonomic groups into the climate vulnerability assessment process, at present vertebrates (and birds in particular) are disproportionately represented and many taxonomic groups are receiving little attention at all in terms of identifying climate change risk (Pacifici et al. 2015). This issue is partly driven by the lack of detailed distribution data for the majority of species globally, so expanding the coverage of existing monitoring schemes to cover new locations and new taxonomic groups as previously suggested will be a first step towards addressing this imbalance. However, given the likelihood that the data required to perform these assessments will not be available in time, or ever, for many species, there must also be some careful consideration given to whether single species vulnerability assessments are a sensible prioritisation option at all. Increased usage of spatial prioritisation type approaches or use of indicator species to assess future risk may be less resource intensive than attempting to prioritise for all species individually, and could still produce

130 positive conservation outcomes for a wide range of species as well as

reducing some of the associated uncertainty previously discussed.

In terms of ensuring climate change vulnerability assessments can have any sort of impact in reducing species losses under climate change, engagement with conservation practitioners and policy makers to ensure the results

assessments are incorporated into the conservation planning process will be required. There is currently little evidence that the results of any climate change vulnerability assessment have been successfully used to prioritise conservation action for a species, with traditional vulnerability assessments based on observed changes and with potentially less uncertainty seemingly being preferred when setting priority species’ lists. Developing methods to incorporate a comprehensive and robust measure of climate change risk as a component within already established and accepted vulnerability

assessments may be required, but efforts should still be made to encourage practitioners to utilise standalone climate change vulnerability assessments as part of their routine planning process for conservation action.

Another issue that will require continued work and discussion with policy makers and conservation practitioners is to improve the integration of conservation management across borders to maximise the impact of

resources being spent to implement on the ground conservation for species. There is evidence that national level planning based on regional Red List assessments may potentially underestimate the relative importance of populations of a species in a wider geographical context, leading to limited conservation action to protect internationally important sites (Keller &

Bollmann 2004). There are also suggestions that as the Red List assessment process was designed to work at a global scale, using it to generate national level assessments can lead to inaccuracies, further reducing the

effectiveness of national only conservation planning (Gardenfors et al. 2001; Popov et al. 2017; Vignoli et al. 2017; Do et al. 2018), although the majority of national level Red List assessments correlate well with the threat status assigned from global assessments (Brito et al. 2010). This is the same issue highlighted by the differences in effectiveness of the fully joined up

131 continental scale and national only scale spatial prioritisations in Chapter 4, with the continental scale approach incorporating the relative importance of species across Europe into the analysis and producing a more coherent set of priority areas.