Ecological islands: conserving biodiversity hotspots in a changing climate

Abstract

For decades, botanists have recognized that rare plants are clustered into ecological “islands”: small and isolated habitat patches produced by landscape features such as sinkholes and bedrock outcrops. Insular ecosystems often provide unusually stressful microhabitats for plant growth (due, for example, to their characteristically thin soils, high temperatures, extreme pH, or limited nutrients) to which rare species are specially adapted. Climate‐driven changes to these stressors may undermine the competitive advantage of stress‐adapted species, allowing them to be displaced by competitors, or may overwhelm their coping strategies altogether. Special features of insular ecosystems – such as extreme habitat fragmentation and association with unusual landscape features – could also affect their climate sensitivity and adaptive capacity. To help predict and manage climate‐change impacts, I present a simple conceptual framework based on a synthesis of over 300 site‐level studies. Using this framework, conservation efforts can leverage existing ecological knowledge to anticipate habitat changes and design targeted strategies for conserving rare species.

Vegetation refugia can inform climate‐adaptive land management under global warming

“…Local elements such as areas within a wildfire that do not burn (Krawchuk et al . ) or landscape elements that persist across centuries even while the surrounding dominant vegetation continues to transition (Cartwright ) may be prioritized for conservation under climate change. Vegetation refugia identify spatial patterns of mean climate stress according to projected climate futures.…”

Congruent spatial patterns of species richness and phylogenetic diversity in karst flora: Case study of Primulina (Gesneriaceae)

“…In China, few karst landscapes occur within nature reserve systems, possibly due to their natural geographical isolation in fragmented habitats. Because of the large number of species with narrow distributions and the uneven floristic data that exist for karst landscapes, each area is unique and potentially important for conservation (Clements et al, 2008; Ravbar & Šebela, 2015; Cartwright, 2019). Although substantial progress has been made in characterizing the geographic patterns of species richness and endemism in China (Ying et al, 1993; López‐Pujol et al, 2011a, 2011b; Huang et al, 2012, 2015; Zhang et al, 2015; Xu et al, 2017a, 2019; Yu et al, 2017; Lu et al, 2018), as far as we know, there has been no study designed to examine the spatial distribution of the phylogenetic diversity and endemism of any karst flora globally.…”

Mapping Natural Forest Remnants with Multi-Source and Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Data for More Informed Management of Global Biodiversity Hotspots

“…The majority of GBHs are tropical forest ecosystems that are not only valuable for their biodiversity but also for their role in hydrological and carbon cycles, moderating environmental extremes, and provision of other ecosystem services for hundreds of millions of people [1][2][3]. Habitat loss and fragmentation due to the expansion of anthropogenic land use is considered as the greatest contemporary threat to these forested GBHs [4][5][6][7]. Recent studies predict that fragmentation, i.e., the division of habitat into smaller and more isolated patches may become the future norm for tropical forest ecosystems [8][9][10].…”