Proposal - Toward climate change refugia conservation at an ecoregion scale in the Sierra Nevada

Proposal to the Climate Adaptation Science Center, USGS. ABSTRACT Climate change uncertainty poses serious challenges to conservation efforts. One emerging conservation strategy is to identify and conserve climate change refugia: areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change that enable persistence of valued resources. This management paradigm may be pursued at broad scales by leveraging existing resources and placing them into a tangible framework to stimulate further collaboration that fosters management decision-making. Here, we describe a framework for moving toward operationalizing climate change refugia conservation at an ecoregion scale with a review for the Sierra Nevada (California, USA). Structured within the Climate Change Refugia Conservation Cycle, we identify a preliminary suite of conservation priorities for the ecoregion, and demonstrate how existing mapping, data, and applications can be used for identifying, prioritizing, managing, and monitoring refugia. We focus on six conservation priorities, including meadows, old growth forests, giant Sequoia, and alpine ecosystems, and introduce the concept of ecosystem process-based refugia, including snow and fire. This pilot overview of concepts and resources provides a foundation of ideas for both near-term implementation and further discussion in moving from science to conservation practice. Such an approach may provide new practical insights for ecosystem management at ecoregion scales in the face of climate change.