Using microclimate to adapt conservation to climate change

生物多样性代表着社会赖以生存的生命支持系统，但日益受到人类活动的威胁。因此，迫切需要经过测试的方法来帮助生物多样性适应气候变化等新出现的威胁。一个可能的第一步是通过利用由不同地貌特征创造的、可以缓冲气候变化影响的小气候来保护现有的受威胁物种种群。保护组织已经在开展影响小气候的活动，例如，通过放牧牲畜来为短植被或破碎植被中的植物或无脊椎动物创造炎热的条件。这些方法是基于到目前为止对受威胁物种成功的管理行动的经验，但相对较少的明确信息可用于指导未来气候变化下的管理活动。我们的目标是提供实际指导，帮助决定应该在哪里针对哪些物种开展哪些活动，以增加生物多样性对气候变化的适应能力。我们将使用在最近NERC资助的研究中开发的技术，以精细的分辨率预测整个英格兰西南部地区的温度和湿度条件的变化。我们将向我们的项目合作伙伴，即负责保护该地区生物多样性的环境组织提供信息，说明这种小气候变化如何影响优先保护的物种。我们将与这些组织密切合作，确保我们开发的资源的格式和内容实用。为达致这个目标，我们会与各机构就区内的保育优先次序保持紧密联系，发展一套可透过地理资讯系统查阅的小气候数据库，并就如何将这项资源应用于保育规划和管理方面，向合作伙伴提供指引和支援。我们将把我们开发的小气候资源应用于英格兰西南部的一些地点，在那里，我们的合作伙伴正在使用创新的景观规模方法指导保护管理，这需要对一系列生境和土地使用进行协调管理。这些景观规模的项目将提供一个机会，将小气候信息应用于现有问题，即在哪里以及如何集中管理活动，以帮助保护物种免受气候变化的潜在负面影响。根据我们在景观规模项目中将这些技术应用于保护管理的经验，我们将与我们的合作伙伴合作，制定一份更广泛的指导文件，以协助规划、优先排序和管理，使英国的生物多样性保护适应气候变化。我们的直接受益者是以自然保护为主要目标的机构，但我们将开发工具和指南，使参与英国环境政策、规划和管理的组织未来能够更广泛地应用这些工具和指南。

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 changeWe 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.