Spatial priorities for climate-change refugia and connectivity for British Columbia (Version 1.1)

Climate-informed conservation priorities in British Columbia (Version 1.1) Territorial acknowledgement: We respectfully acknowledge that we live and work across diverse unceded territories and treaty lands and pay our respects to the First Nations, Inuit and Métis ancestors of these places. We honour our connections to these lands and waters and reaffirm our relationships with one another. Suggested citation: Stolar, J., D. Stralberg, I. Naujokaitis-Lewis, S.E. Nielsen, and G. Kehm. 2024. Spatial priorities for climate-change refugia and connectivity for British Columbia (Version 1.1). Place of publication: University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.10603162 Corresponding author: stolar@ualberta.ca Summary: The purpose of this project is to identify spatial locations of (a) vulnerabilities within British Columbia’s current network of protected areas and (b) priorities for conservation and management of natural landscapes within British Columbia under a range of future climate-change scenarios. This involved adaptation and implementation of existing continental- and provincial-scale frameworks for identifying areas that have potential to serve as refugia from climate change or corridors for species migration. Outcomes of this work include the provision of practical guidance for protected areas network design and vulnerabilities identification under climate change, with application to other regions and jurisdictions. Project results, in the form of multiple spatial prioritization scenarios, may be used to evaluate the resilience of the existing protected area network and other conservation designations to better understand the risks to British Columbia’s biodiversity in our changing climate. Description: These raster layers represent different scenarios of Zonation rankings of conservation priorities for climate resilience and connectivity between current and 2080s conditions for a provincial-scale analysis. Input conservation features included metrics of macrorefugia (forward and backward climate velocity (km/year), overlapping future and current habitat suitability for ~900 rare species in BC), microrefugia (presence of old growth ecosystems, drought refugia, glaciers/cool slopes/wetlands, and geodiversity), and connectivity. Please see details in the accompanying report. File nomenclature: .zip folder (Stolar_et_al_2024_CiCP_Zenodo_upload_Version_1.1.zip):Contains the files listed below. Macrorefugia (2080s_macrorefugia.tif):Scenari