HR: 17:30h
AN: B54B-07    [Abstracts]
TI: Thresholds in conservation effectiveness under climate change
AU: * Hansen, A
EM: hansen@montana.edu
AF: Montana State University, 310 Lewis Hall, Bozeman, MT 59717, United States
AU: Phillips, L
EM: lphillips@montana.edu
AF: Montana State University, 310 Lewis Hall, Bozeman, MT 59717, United States
AB: We describe a new approach to conservation that derives from the effect of energy on ecosystem properties and then evaluate potential threshold responses of conservation effectiveness under climate change. Many tests of species energy theory provide evidence that species richness varies with measures of energy such as net primary productivity (NPP). Across continents, this relationship is most often unimodal, with species richness peaking in intermediate energy places and decreasing at higher NPP levels. NPP also influences ecosystem response to habitat fragmentation, recovery after disturbance, and trophic relationships. We have developed a topology for conservation whereby conservation priorities and management effectiveness differ among low, intermediate, and high energy ecosystems. We evaluated the projected change in NPP and conservation topology of ecoregions under future climate change scenarios. We found that projected NPP under climate change caused a subset of ecoregions to shift across the peak of the unimodal species energy curve, suggesting dramatic changes in conservation effectiveness are possible.
DE: 0410 Biodiversity
DE: 0476 Plant ecology (1851)
DE: 0480 Remote sensing
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting