Marco Neubert

Managing protected areas under climate change: challenges and priorities.

The implementation of adaptation actions in local conservation management is a new and complex task with multiple facets, influenced by factors differing from site to site. A transdisciplinary perspective is therefore required to identify and implement effective solutions. To address this, the International Conference on Managing Protected Areas under Climate Change brought together international scientists, conservation managers, and decision-makers to discuss current experiences with local adaptation of conservation management. This paper summarizes the main issues for implementing adaptation that emerged from the conference. These include a series of conclusions and recommendations on monitoring, sensitivity assessment, current and future management practices, and legal and policy aspects. A range of spatial and temporal scales must be considered in the implementation of climate-adapted management. The adaptation process must be area-specific and consider the ecosystem and the social and economic conditions within and beyond protected area boundaries. However, a strategic overview is also needed: management at each site should be informed by conservation priorities and likely impacts of climate change at regional or even wider scales. Acting across these levels will be a long and continuous process, requiring coordination with actors outside the “traditional” conservation sector. To achieve this, a range of research, communication, and policy/legal actions is required. We identify a series of important actions that need to be taken at different scales to enable managers of protected sites to adapt successfully to a changing climate.

Remote Sensing-Based Monitoring of Potential Climate-Induced Impacts on Habitats

Remote sensing has been established as a valuable support to field mapping and monitoring of vegetation compositions, habitats, and single species. However, the time-span of data acquisition, especially of advanced very high spatial and temporal resolution sensors, is not long enough for the monitoring of climate-induced impacts on habitats.

Natural Heritage at Risk by Climate Change

Even though mitigation of climate change is of utmost importance, managing the impacts of climate change is becoming a growing issue in nature conservation. Its negative effects on biodiversity are adding to the mix of existing problems in protected areas. These effects themselves also interact in various direct and indirect ways on local level. This book sets out to meet the growing need to share knowledge and experiences in the field of biodiversity conservation and climate change in protected areas. It is based on the results of the EU-funded HABIT-CHANGE project. The project focused on the implementation of climate adapted management in protected areas all over Central and Eastern Europe. The experiences of implementing adaptation strategies, as well as the intensive discussions with experts in conservation management, have produced an unrivalled wealth of information about existing problems and solutions on local to regional level. This book gives a comprehensive overview of the project and its results. The general chapters provide information that can be easily transferred to other areas, whilst the case studies illustrate how to tackle climate impacts on the local level. The latter compile valuable experiences and recommendations from adapted management strategies applied in the field. The know-how documented in this volume should help other conservation managers handle the challenges of climate-adapted management. Taking a transdisciplinary perspective, the book aims to attract an audience of experts in the field of conservation management from administration, protected areas, and science.

Conclusions and Recommendations for Adapting Conservation Management in the Face of Climate Change

In HABIT-CHANGE several barriers for the adaptation of conservation management have been identified. Much information and many methods do not fit with planning reality and the decision context at site level. Management authorities as well as land users and stakeholders often lack sufficient expertise and incentives to initiate adaptation activities. At present, learning by doing still plays a fundamental role in the adaptation of conservation management. It is as much a social learning process as it is a science-based procedure. Adaptation to climate change is a cross-sectoral issue. Therefore, stakeholder involvement and guidance of land use-related adaptation activities are of major importance. Available resources and the institutional setting of protected areas have a considerable influence on the capacity and willingness to adapt. Many administrations are not sufficiently equipped to respond to the impacts of climate change. There is an urgent need to build capacity in protected areas to monitor, assess, manage and report the effects of climate change and their interaction with other pressures. More collaboration between science and management will help to develop expertise and identify the most important knowledge gaps.

Connectivity of Protected Areas in Central European Border Regions

Within the scope of the project TransEcoNet (Transnational Ecological Networks in Central Europe), the transnational ecologically important areas in border regions within Central and Eastern Europe were analyzed. In this study, an ecological network is to be understood as the existing network of protected areas. The area under investigation stretches from the Baltic Sea to the Ukraine and to the Adriatic Sea, covering the NUTS 3 (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics, level 3) regions adjoining selected inner Central European national boundaries. The analyses are based on spatial data and are performed in a Geographical Information System. After collecting and harmonizing national as well as European data sets of protected areas, all areas were classified according to the international standard provided by the categories of International Union for Conservation of Nature and reclassified as core and non-core areas according to their protection status and size. The connectivity of the network was estimated using the results of a nearest neighbor analysis. In general, the results showed a good level of coverage by nature protection sites as well as a good connectivity between them within the area under investigation. Thus, other border areas besides the Green Belt, the former Iron Curtain, also form important ecological networks and provide important ecological functions and services for society.

Remote sensing methods to monitor habitats potentially threatened by climate change

The recognition and monitoring of vegetation and habitats for nature conservation is a vital point of research within the remote sensing community. It has been agreed on that there is no general solution on deriving information on habitats due to different data availability and spectral as well as textural behaviour of habitat main types (e.g. woodlands, grasslands, etc.). Therefore the monitoring should be rather multi-scale, versatile, user-friendly, and cost-efficient for predefined indicators. In the presented study, five Central European test sites of natural vegetation communities in an Alpine area (1), a temperate forest (2), a Pannonian grassland (3), a shallow lake (4) and a Carpathian grassland (5) have been investigated by multi-temporal remote sensing. For these studies, different time-series of RapidEye images from the years 2009 to 2011 were acquired. The amount of the images was depending on required acquisitions dates as well as weather conditions. The definition of the indicators was relying on the available ground truth data as well as the demands and judgement of the managing authorities in the nature conservation areas. The selected methods for deriving of the indicators depend on the time-series as well as the available calibration and validation data. The techniques vary between unsupervised classification, object-based approaches and supervised classification methods with algorithms such as support vector machines (e.g. SVM) or classification trees (e.g. See5). Often the named methods are utilized in combined approaches. The resulting indicators for the monitoring are shrub encroachment (for 1), share of naturally occurring tree type (for 2), differentiation of grassland types (for 3 and 5) and the changing extent of a reed belt (for 4). All indicators seem to be valid and useful. However, a transferability of the methods or a general statement on good-practice remote sensing applications can hardly be derived from these specific case studies.