• Energy Research

In the face of climate change, predicting and understanding future fire regimes across Canada is a high priority for wildland fire research and management. Due in large part to the difficulties in obtaining future daily fire weather projections, one of the major challenges in predicting future fire activity is to estimate how much of the change in weather potential could translate into on-the-ground fire spread. As a result, past studies have used monthly, annual, or multi-decadal weather projections to predict future fires, thereby sacrificing information relevant to day-to-day fire spread. Using climate projections from the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), historical weather observations, MODIS fire detection data, and the national fire database of Canada, this study investigated potential changes in the number of active burning days of wildfires by relating ‘spread days’ to patterns of daily fire-conducive weather. Results suggest that climate change over the next century may have significant impacts on fire spread days in almost all parts of Canada’s forested landmass; the number of fire spread days could experience a 2-to-3-fold increase under a high CO _2 forcing scenario in eastern Canada, and a greater than 50% increase in western Canada, where the fire potential is already high. The change in future fire spread is critical in understanding fire regime changes, but is also imminently relevant to fire management operations and in fire risk mitigation.

AbstractAs most regions of the earth transition to altered climatic conditions, new methods are needed to identify refugia and other areas whose conservation would facilitate persistence of biodiversity under climate change. We compared several common approaches to conservation planning focused on climate resilience over a broad range of ecological settings across North America and evaluated how commonalities in the priority areas identified by different methods varied with regional context and spatial scale. Our results indicate that priority areas based on different environmental diversity metrics differed substantially from each other and from priorities based on spatiotemporal metrics such as climatic velocity. Refugia identified by diversity or velocity metrics were not strongly associated with the current protected area system, suggesting the need for additional conservation measures including protection of refugia. Despite the inherent uncertainties in predicting future climate, we found that variation among climatic velocities derived from different general circulation models and emissions pathways was less than the variation among the suite of environmental diversity metrics. To address uncertainty created by this variation, planners can combine priorities identified by alternative metrics at a single resolution and downweight areas of high variation between metrics. Alternately, coarse‐resolution velocity metrics can be combined with fine‐resolution diversity metrics in order to leverage the respective strengths of the two groups of metrics as tools for identification of potential macro‐ and microrefugia that in combination maximize both transient and long‐term resilience to climate change. Planners should compare and integrate approaches that span a range of model complexity and spatial scale to match the range of ecological and physical processes influencing persistence of biodiversity and identify a conservation network resilient to threats operating at multiple scales.

Earth is facing simultaneous biodiversity and climate crises. Climate-change refugia - areas that are relatively buffered from climate change - can help address both of these problems by maintaining biodiversity components when the surrounding landscape no longer can. However, this capacity to support biodiversity is often vulnerable to severe climate change and other stressors. Thus, management actions need to consider the complex and multidimensional nature of refugia. We outline an approach to understand refugia-promoting processes and to evaluate refugial capacity to determine suitable management actions. Our framework applies climate-change refugia as tools to facilitate resistance in modern conservation planning. Such refugia-focused management can reduce extinctions and maintain biodiversity under climate change.

AbstractSuccessful restoration of human‐disturbed landscapes and ecosystems will be increasingly compromised by the impacts of climate warming. Assisted migration and climate‐informed restoration, in which populations and species adapted to future climates are selected for restoration planting, have emerged as management tools to mitigate climate change effects. However, it is unclear whether climate‐informed restoration could offset the negative effects of climate change and enable successful restoration. We used a forest landscape model to evaluate the potential for reclamation activities to restore western Canadian boreal forest landscapes severely degraded by oil sands mining. We parametrized tree populations adapted to growing in warmer climates and then simulated the planting of local or southern tree populations under different climate change, mining, and wildfire disturbance scenarios. We found that planting trees better adapted to a warmer climate mitigated climate‐change and wildfire‐caused decreases in biomass across the landscape, but only under moderate climate change scenarios. The compensatory effect of planting populations adapted to warmer southern climates disappeared under a more severe climate change scenario. The advantage of planting southern populations also disappeared under wildfire scenarios, generally doubling the biomass loss compared with scenarios without wildfire. With wildfire and strong climate change effects, forest cover disappeared from much of the landscape, regardless of the planting scenario, causing it to change markedly from present‐day continuous boreal forest cover. We argue that such conditions would have large ecological and economic consequences. Scenario modeling with forest landscape models could be used as a tool to identify the long‐term success of restoration actions and to understand possible consequences of climate‐informed restoration.

Climate change presents a major threat to biodiversity globally. Northern ecosystems, such as Canada's boreal forest, are predicted to experience particularly severe climate-induced changes. These changes may reduce the carrying capacity and habitat suitability of the boreal forest for many wildlife species. Boreal birds are susceptible to both direct and indirect effects of climate change, and several studies have predicted northward shifts in species distributions as temperatures become warmer. We forecasted spatially-explicit changes in the densities of 72 boreal landbird species using integrated climate change projections and a forest dynamics model in the Taiga Plains ecozone of the Northwest Territories (NT), Canada, over the 2011–2091 horizon. We 1) identified ''winner,'' ''loser,'' and ''bellringer'' species over short (2031) and long-term (2091) forecasts, 2) mapped landbird range and density changes under three contrasting Global Circulation Models (GCMs), and 3) quantify differences in landbird density predictions across a latitudinal gradient. Species that showed a moderate increase or decrease in their predicted abundance were considered ''winners'' and ''losers,'' respectively. Species that showed a marked increase or decrease – a doubling or halving – of their predicted abundance in all three GCMs, were termed ''bellringers''. From 2011–2031, only 2/72 (2.8%) were considered winners, and 3/72 (4.2%) were losers. From 2011–2091, the abundance of more species was predicted to change: 26/72 (36.1%) were winners, and 10/72 species (13.9%) were losers. Four species were considered bellringers: Gray-cheeked Thrush, White-crowned Sparrow, Fox Sparrow, and American Tree Sparrow. Overall, projected range shifts were strongly oriented along a southeast-to-northwest axis. Shifts to the north and south were evenly distributed among all three GCMs. Our results suggest that future climate-mitigated distribution shifts and population declines of boreal landbirds will require targeted conservation actions. They also highlight the importance of the NT as a potential refugium for many boreal-breeding landbird species in Canada.

Climate-informed conservation priorities in British Columbia (Version 1.0) 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. 2023. Spatial priorities for climate-change refugia and connectivity for British Columbia (Version 1.0). Place of publication: University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.8333303 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_2023_CiCP_Zenodo_upload_Version_1.0.zip): Contains the files listed below. Macrorefugia (2080s_macrorefugia.tif): Scenarios for each taxonomic group (equal weightings for all species) (Core-area Zonation Function) Climate-type velocity + species scenarios from above (Core-area Zonation; equal weightings) Microrefugia (microrefugia.tif): Scenario with old growth forest habitat, landscape geodiversity, wetlands/cool slopes/glaciers, drought refugia (Core-area Zonation; equal weightings) Overall scenario (2080s_macro_micro_connectivity.tif): Inputs from above (with equal weightings) + connectivity metrics (each weighted at 0.1) (Additive Benefit Function Zonation) Conservation priorities (Conservation_priorities_2080s.tif): Overall scenario from above extracted to regions of low human footprint. Restoration priorities (Restoration_priorities_2080s.tif): Overall scenario from above extracted to regions of high human footprint. Accompanying report (Stolar_et_al_2023_CiCP_Zenodo_upload_Version_1.0.pdf): Documentation of rationale, methods and interpretation. READ_ME file (READ_ME_PLEASE.txt): Metadata. Legend interpretation: Ranked Zonation priorities increase from 0 (lowest) to 1 (highest). Raster information: Columns and Rows: 1597, 1368 Number of Bands: 1 Cell Size (X, Y): 1000, 1000 Format: TIFF Pixel Type: floating point Compression: LZW Spatial reference: XY Coordinate System: NAD_1983_Albers Linear Unit: Meter (1.000000) Angular Unit: Degree (0.0174532925199433) false_easting: 1000000 false_northing: 0 central_meridian: -126 standard_parallel_1: 50 standard_parallel_2: 58.5 latitude_of_origin: 45 Datum: D_North_American_1983 Extent: West -139.061502 East -110.430823 North 60.605550 South 47.680823 Disclaimer: The University of Alberta (UofA) is furnishing this deliverable "as is". UofA does not provide any warranty of the contents of the deliverable whatsoever, whether express, implied, or statutory, including, but not limited to, any warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose or any warranty that the contents of the deliverable will be error-free. Funding: We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship) and the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, the BC Parks Living Lab for Climate Change and Conservation, and the Wilburforce Foundation. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship) and the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, the BC Parks Living Lab for Climate Change and Conservation, and the Wilburforce Foundation.

Velocity-based macrorefugia for boreal passerine birds Citation for dataset -------------------- Stralberg, D. Velocity-based macrorefugia for boreal passerine birds. Boreal Avian Modelling Project. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1299880 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1299880 Data layers ----------------- Refugia layers represent mid-century (2041-2070) and end-of-century (2071-2100) conditions for the SRES A2 emissions scenario at 4-km resolution ----------------- Combined index for 53 species (clipped to Brandt's boreal region): _refbrandt53_YYYYZZZZ Species-specific indices: XXXX_refYYYY where: YYYY = Time period (2050s or 2080s) ZZZZ = weighted or unweighted XXXX = Songbird Species Code (see Birdlookup.csv) Percentile values of refugia indices for mapping purposes 0.01 0.1 0.25 0.5 0.75 0.9 0.99 "2050s, weighted " 0.032 0.243 0.317 0.399 0.484 0.589 0.779 "2080s, weighted" 0.002 0.09 0.137 0.2 0.281 0.386 0.675 "2050s, unweighted" 0.006 0.108 0.159 0.218 0.292 0.358 0.421 "2080s, unweighted" 0.001 0.055 0.083 0.123 0.185 0.241 0.297 Projection information ------------------- """+proj=lcc +lat_1=49 +lat_2=77 +lat_0=0 +lon_0=-95 +x_0=0 +y_0=0 +ellps=GRS80 +units=m +no_defs""" ------------------- Projection LAMBERT Spheroid GRS80 Units METERS Zunits NO Xshift 0.0 Yshift 0.0 Parameters 49 0 0.0 /* 1st standard parallel 77 0 0.0 /* 2nd standard parallel -95 0 0.0 /* central meridian 0 0 0.0 /* latitude of projection's origin 0.0 /* false easting (meters) 0.0 /* false northing (meters)