Using microclimate to adapt conservation to climate change

Biodiversity represents the life support system on which society depends, but is increasingly threatened by human activities. As a result, there is an urgent need for tested methods to help biodiversity to adapt to emerging threats such as climate change. One possible first step is to protect existing populations of threatened species by making use of the microclimates that are created by different features of the landscape, and that can buffer the effects of climate change. Conservation organisations already carry out activities that influence microclimate, for example by grazing livestock to create hot conditions for plants or invertebrates in short or broken vegetation. Such approaches are based on experience of management actions that have been successful for threatened species until now, but relatively little explicit information is available to guide these management activities under future climate change. We aim to provide practical guidance to help decide what activities should be carried out, where, and for which species, to increase the resilience of biodiversity to climate change

We will use techniques developed during recent NERC-funded research, to predict variation in temperature and moisture conditions at a fine resolution throughout the landscape of South West England. We will provide our project partners, the environmental organisations that are charged with conserving biodiversity in the region, with information on how this microclimate variation influences priority species for conservation. We will work closely with these organisations to ensure that the format and content of the resources we develop are practically useful. To achieve this goal, we will liaise closely with the organisations about their conservation priorities in the region, develop a set of microclimate databases to access via Geographic Information Systems, and provide guidance and support to the partners on the application of this resource to conservation planning and management.

We will apply the microclimate resources we develop to locations in South-West England in which our partners are guiding conservation management using innovative landscape-scale approaches, which require coordinated management across a range of habitats and land-uses. These landscape-scale projects will provide an opportunity to apply the microclimate information to existing questions of where and how to focus management activities to help protect species against potentially negative effects of climate change. Based on our experience of applying these techniques to conservation management in the landscape-scale projects, we will work with our partners to produce a broader guidance document to assist with planning, prioritisation and management to adapt UK biodiversity conservation to climate change. Our direct beneficiaries are bodies whose primary goal is nature conservation, but we will develop tools and guidance in a format that enables their wider future application by organisations involved with environmental policy, planning and management in the UK.