Erica Fleishman

A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2014

Highlights • This is the fifth in our annual series of horizon scans published in TREE.• We identify 15 issues that we considered insufficiently known by the conservation community.• These cover a wide range of issues. Four relate to climate change, two to invasives and two to disease spread.• This exercise has been influential in the past.

One Hundred Questions of Importance to the Conservation of Global Biological Diversity

We identified 100 scientific questions that, if answered, would have the greatest impact on conservation practice and policy. Representatives from 21 international organizations, regional sections and working groups of the Society for Conservation Biology, and 12 academics, from all continents except Antarctica, compiled 2291 questions of relevance to conservation of biological diversity worldwide. The questions were gathered from 761 individuals through workshops, email requests, and discussions. Voting by email to short-list questions, followed by a 2-day workshop, was used to derive the final list of 100 questions. Most of the final questions were derived through a process of modification and combination as the workshop progressed. The questions are divided into 12 sections: ecosystem functions and services, climate change, technological change, protected areas, ecosystem management and restoration, terrestrial ecosystems, marine ecosystems, freshwater ecosystems, species management, organizational systems and processes, societal context and change, and impacts of conservation interventions. We anticipate that these questions will help identify new directions for researchers and assist funders in directing funds.

A NEW METHOD FOR SELECTION OF UMBRELLA SPECIES FOR CONSERVATION PLANNING

Umbrella species, species whose protection serves to protect many co-occurring species, have been proposed as a shortcut for conservation planning. Potential criteria for selection of umbrella species include rarity, sensitivity to human disturbance, and mean percentage of co-occurring species. Using butterflies in montane canyons in the Great Basin (USA) as a case study, we examined correlations among those three selection methods. We also developed a new index that specifically ranks species according to their potential to serve as umbrellas for their taxonomic group. Different methods for prioritizing species generally produced divergent rankings. Although rare butterflies tended to co-occur with more species than widespread butterflies, rare species may be poor umbrellas because their distributions are too highly restricted and often cannot be influenced by managers. Umbrella species are useful in meeting certain conservation challenges, particularly prioritization of habitat remnants for conservation...

Linking spatial patterns of bird and butterfly species richness with Landsat TM derived NDVI

The ability to predict spatial patterns of species richness using a few easily measured environmental variables would facilitate timely evaluation of potential impacts of anthropogenic and natural disturbances on biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Two common hypotheses maintain that faunal species richness can be explained in part by either local vegetation heterogeneity or primary productivity. Although remote sensing has long been identified as a potentially powerful source of information on the latter, its principal application to biodiversity studies has been to develop classified vegetation maps at relatively coarse resolution, which then have been used to estimate animal diversity. Although classification schemes can be delineated on the basis of species composition of plants, these schemes generally do not provide information on primary productivity. Furthermore, the classification procedure is a time- and labour-intensive process, yielding results with limited accuracy. To meet decision-making needs and to develop land management strategies, more efficient methods of generating information on the spatial distribution of faunal diversity are needed. This article reports on the potential of predicting species richness using single-date Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) derived from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM). We use NDVI as an indicator of vegetation productivity, and examine the relationship of three measures of NDVI—mean, maximum, and standard deviation—with patterns of bird and butterfly species richness at various spatial scales. Results indicate a positive correlation, but with no definitive functional form, between species richness and productivity. The strongest relationships between species richness of birds and NDVI were observed at larger sampling grains and extent, where each of the three NDVI measures explained more than 50% of the variation in species richness. The relationship between species richness of butterflies and NDVI was strongest over smaller grains. Results suggest that measures of NDVI are an alternative approach for explaining the spatial variability of species richness of birds and butterflies.

Top 40 Priorities for Science to Inform US Conservation and Management Policy

To maximize the utility of research to decisionmaking, especially given limited financial resources, scientists must set priorities for their efforts. We present a list of the top 40 high-priority, multidisciplinary research questions directed toward informing some of the most important current and future decisions about management of species, communities, and ecological processes in the United States. The questions were generated by an open, inclusive process that included personal interviews with decisionmakers, broad solicitation of research needs from scientists and policymakers, and an intensive workshop that included scientifically oriented individuals responsible for managing and developing policy related to natural resources. The process differed from previous efforts to set priorities for conservation research in its focus on the engagement of decisionmakers in addition to researchers. The research priorities emphasized the importance of addressing societal context and exploration of trade-offs among alternative policies and actions, as well as more traditional questions related to ecological processes and functions.

Options for National parks and reserves for adapting to climate change.

Past and present climate has shaped the valued ecosystems currently protected in parks and reserves, but future climate change will redefine these conditions. Continued conservation as climate changes will require thinking differently about resource management than we have in the past; we present some logical steps and tools for doing so. Three critical tenets underpin future management plans and activities: (1) climate patterns of the past will not be the climate patterns of the future; (2) climate defines the environment and influences future trajectories of the distributions of species and their habitats; (3) specific management actions may help increase the resilience of some natural resources, but fundamental changes in species and their environment may be inevitable. Science-based management will be necessary because past experience may not serve as a guide for novel future conditions. Identifying resources and processes at risk, defining thresholds and reference conditions, and establishing monitoring and assessment programs are among the types of scientific practices needed to support a broadened portfolio of management activities. In addition to the control and hedging management strategies commonly in use today, we recommend adaptive management wherever possible. Adaptive management increases our ability to address the multiple scales at which species and processes function, and increases the speed of knowledge transfer among scientists and managers. Scenario planning provides a broad forward-thinking framework from which the most appropriate management tools can be chosen. The scope of climate change effects will require a shared vision among regional partners. Preparing for and adapting to climate change is as much a cultural and intellectual challenge as an ecological challenge.

The Adaptation for Conservation Targets (ACT) Framework: A Tool for Incorporating Climate Change into Natural Resource

As natural resource management agencies and conservation organizations seek guidance on responding to climate change, myriad potential actions and strategies have been proposed for increasing the long-term viability of some attributes of natural systems. Managers need practical tools for selecting among these actions and strategies to develop a tailored management approach for specific targets at a given location. We developed and present one such tool, the participatory Adaptation for Conservation Targets (ACT) framework, which considers the effects of climate change in the development of management actions for particular species, ecosystems and ecological functions. Our framework is based on the premise that effective adaptation of management to climate change can rely on local knowledge of an ecosystem and does not necessarily require detailed projections of climate change or its effects. We illustrate the ACT framework by applying it to an ecological function in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, USA)—water flows in the upper Yellowstone River. We suggest that the ACT framework is a practical tool for initiating adaptation planning, and for generating and communicating specific management interventions given an increasingly altered, yet uncertain, climate.

A realistic assessment of the indicator potential of butterflies and other charismatic taxonomic groups.

Charismatic groups of animals and plants often are proposed as sentinels of environmental status and trends. Nevertheless, many claims that a certain taxonomic group can provide more-general information on environmental quality are not evaluated critically. To address several of the many definitions of indicator species, we used butterflies to explore in some detail the attributes that affect implementation of indicators generically. There probably are few individual species, or sets of species, that can serve as scientifically valid, cost-effective measures of the status or trend of an environmental phenomenon that is difficult to measure directly. Nevertheless, there are species with distributions, abundances, or demographic characteristics that are responsive to known environmental changes. In this context, single or multiple species can serve as indicators when targets are defined explicitly, ecological relationships between the target and the putative indicators are well understood, and data are sufficient to differentiate between deterministic and stochastic responses. Although these situations exist, they are less common than might be apparent from an extensive and often confounded literature on indicators. Instead, the public appeal of charismatic groups may be driving much of their acclaim as indicators. The same taxon may not be appropriate for marketing a general conservation mission and for drawing strong inference about specific environmental changes. To provide insights into the progress of conservation efforts, it is essential to identify scientific and practical criteria for selection and application of indicators and then to examine whether a given taxonomic group meets those criteria.

Nestedness analysis and conservation planning: the importance of place, environment, and life history across taxonomic groups

Abstract. We used nested subsets analysis to examine distribution patterns of birds and butterflies in the same set of 83 locations in canyons of three mountain ranges in the Great Basin of western North America. We tested whether the same environmental variables influenced nestedness among taxonomic groups and among mountain ranges within taxonomic groups. We also examined whether nestedness of birds and butterflies appeared to be sensitive to human use of riparian areas in the ecoregion. Site area and topography did not appear to differ in their influence on nestedness of birds. By contrast, area and topography differed in how strongly they affected nestedness of butterflies, but their respective influence varied among mountain ranges. Riparian dependence had little discernible effect on nested distribution patterns of either taxonomic group. Because processes influencing distribution patterns can differ among taxonomic groups, and the relative importance of those processes may vary spatially even within a taxonomic group, we urge restraint in using birds and butterflies as surrogates of other taxa for conservation planning.

Climate Change, Ecosystem Impacts, and Management for Pacific Salmon

Abstract As climate change intensifies, there is increasing interest in developing models that reduce uncertainties in projections of global climate and refine these projections to finer spatial scales. Forecasts of climate impacts on ecosystems are far more challenging and their uncertainties even larger because of a limited understanding of physical controls on biological systems. Management and conservation plans that explicitly account for changing climate are rare and even those generally rely on retrospective analyses rather than future scenarios of climatic conditions and associated responses of specific ecosystems. Using past biophysical relationships as a guide to predicting the impacts of future climate change assumes that the observed relationships will remain constant. However, this assumption involves a long chain of uncertainty about future greenhouse gas emissions, climate sensitivity to changes in greenhouse gases, and the ecological consequences of climate change. These uncertainties in f...