Project period: 1 1 25-12 31 25PROJECT title: species range shifts, protected areas, and climate connectivityprotected areas play a critical role in supporting biodiversity and may serve as…

Project period: 1 1 25-12 31 25PROJECT title: species range shifts, protected areas, and climate connectivityprotected areas play a critical role in supporting biodiversity and may serve as steppingstones for species undergoing climate-induced range shifts. IT is assumed that species will track their suitable climate through space and time, shifting their ranges in response to climate changes. However, climate connectivity the ability of a landscape to facilitate or impede climate-induced movement will strongly influence how plants are able to track suitable climates. Several factors affect climate connectivity and plant species movements. First, the distance that needs to be traveled to track suitable climate may exceed the dispersal ability of many species. Second, land use intensity in the unprotected matrix will limit climate-induced range shifts among protected areas for some species. Third, exposure to increasingly dissimilar climates may impede climate-induced range shifts. These constraints are well established but have not yet been integrated to predict species-specific range movements and identify where intervention might be necessary to facilitate climate connectivity. This project will develop species-specific assessments of climate connectivity and potential range shifts for a suite of management-relevant plant species within the north central and rocky mountain protected area network. More specifically, will use spatial climate analogs and forest inventory and analysis data to 1) project potential climate induced range shifts in woody plant taxa for national parks, national forests, and the unprotected matrix of federal, state, and tribal lands between these areas 2) evaluate climatic and non-climatic factors that may facilitate or impede successful range shifts 3) provide our management partners with geospatial datasets on potential vegetation compositional shifts and factors that impede climate connectivity and 4) provide a decision support tool for interpreting these results. The results will help resource managers in the region understand the consequences of choosing to not intervene and therefore accept vegetation changes, as well as where and how managers might intervene to direct change (e.g., by translocating the species to conserve IT and or steering ecological change along a preferred trajectory), or resist change where establishment of the species is undesirable. The supported research will be CO-produced with resource managers within glacier NP, yellowstone NP, grand teton NP, grand mesa, uncompahgre, gunnison national forest, and SAN juan national forest.