PhD Thesis

The future of protected areas: towards a multiscale management strategy enabling movement in face of climate change

Alexandra Lawrence (09/2017-10/2022)

Support: Carl Beierkuhnlein, Manuel Steinbauer, Cyrus Samimi

Despite growing societal awareness and rising political will to protect the planet’s biodiversity, we are still in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. Habitat loss and fragmentation from anthropogenic development is considered the primary driver of species extinctions worldwide. In addition, human induced climate change is projected to severely decrease global biodiversity and markedly reduce the effectiveness of protected areas as nature conservation tools. In many cases, climate change will lead to shifts in species distributions by compelling migration poleward and towards higher elevations as species attempt to track suitable climatic conditions. Hence, the synergistic impacts of anthropogenic climate change – forcing species to move – and habitat loss from fragmentation – preventing species from moving – can be detrimental to species persistence and severely reduce the effectiveness of current protected areas. In this thesis I formulate concrete recommendations for protected area expansion and management suited to the EU biodiversity strategy for 2030, which are primarily built on the objective of preserving large areas in the last remaining low fragmented lands on one of the world’s most anthropogenically modified continents. I demonstrate that topographic diversity is correlated with climate change resilience in protected areas because climatic conditions can move within the boundaries of topographically diverse protected areas, allowing mobile species to establish new habitats within extant protected areas. I further present options for Europe to foster movement of individuals, populations, and species by expanding protected areas into low fragmented surroundings. Finally, I present current and future potentialities to preserve the capacity for species movement in existing protected areas in the EU. These recommendations offer insights into landscape conservation strategies capable of maximizing the ability of species to move as local climatic conditions change (manuscript 1). Hence, I argue in this thesis that conservationists and policymakers should prioritize expanding protected areas so as to stem the impacts of additional fragmenting infrastructure (manuscript 2) while also managing existing protected areas by prioritizing anti-fragmentation approaches (manuscript 3). This strategy has the potential to directly and indirectly tackle two major threats to biodiversity: loss and fragmentation of habitat as well as climate change. This strategy is simultaneously applicable on multiple scales while also being relatively easy for policymakers to understand and is therefore translatable to actual conservation practice