Considering the implications of climate-induced species range shifts in marine protected areas planning

Abstract

Climate change is affecting the ocean, altering the biogeography of marine species. Yet marine protected area (MPA) planning still rarely incorporates projected species range shifts. We used the outputs of species distribution models fitted with biological and climate data as inputs to identify trends in occurrence for marine species in British Columbia (BC), Canada. We assessed and compared two ways of incorporating climate change projections into MPA planning. First, we overlaid 98 species with modelled distributions now and by the mid-21st century under two contrasting (“no mitigation” and “strong mitigation”) climate change scenarios with existing Provincial marine parks in BC, to ask which species could overlap with protected areas in the future. Second, we completed a spatial prioritization analysis using Marxan with the projected future species ranges as inputs, to ask where priority regions exist for the 98 marine species. We found that many BC marine parks will lose species in both climate scenarios that we analyzed, and that protecting 30% of important marine species will be challenging under the “no mitigation” climate change scenario. Challenges included the coarse resolution of the data and uncertainty in projecting species range shifts.

Evaluating the design of the first marine protected area network in Pacific Canada under a changing climate

“…The results of Whitney et al (2023) differ somewhat from the Thompson et al (2023) projection models used here. These differences are likely due to the use of GCMs by Whitney et al (2023) compared to the regional climate models available for use by Thompson et al (2023) that have complex bathymetry with a high enough spatial resolution to resolve important coastal processes (Peña et al 2019;Holdsworth et al 2021). Additional differences may be due to the fact that Thompson et al (2023) explicitly account for the confounding effects of depth on temperature and oxygen.…”

“…Often, the lack of data or the uncertainty associated with broadscale climate projection models are the barriers to integrating climate change into marine spatial and conservation planning (Tittensor et al 2019;Wilson et al 2020), and this was true for this planning process as well. For example, Whitney et al (2023) used global climate models (GCMs) and available information on correlative marine species distributions in the NSB to better understand where MPAs may protect the most diversity under future climate scenarios. Although this research was concurrent and made available to the MPATT team, the resolution of the data, the scale at which the projected changes were evaluated, and the uncertainty associated with the results made it difficult to confidently integrate it into the MPA network design process.…”