Boreal forest refugia for fire and climate change

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A central question in ecology and conservation is how biodiversity will respond to climate change - essentially identifying species and places that are likely to be more or less vulnerable. Recent work on the velocity of climate change has illustrated how macro-terrain and maritime features can reduce climate velocity resulting in definable areas of macrorefugia where species are likely to persist. Although much has been done to understand refugia at macro-scales, smaller scale landscape features can also decouple a location's temperature from its surrounding climate resulting in microrefugia. And unlike macrorefugia, microrefugia can not be easily predicted from downscaled climate models resulting in gaps in our understanding and predictions. Existing work on microrefugia emphasizes local topography with surprisingly little work on the effects of large lakes on adjacent mainland microclimates and hence areas of potential microrefugia. Yet some large lakes are known to have disjunct species along their shoreline with populations >1,000 km south of their main range representing relicts of a previous cooler climate. Understanding these patterns informs current threats and future responses. A second aspect of large lakes that is often underappreciated is their ability to diversify fire regimes by fragmenting fuel and blocking fire spread. This not only creates fire refugia that supports old-growth species along their shorelines and on islands, but also potentially supporting higher landscape-scale biodiversity. When taken together, lake-derived climate and fire refugia can be synergistic in their location strengthening further the refugia effect. My long-term research goals are to understand the processes governing the distribution, dynamics, and interactions of species and ecosystems and to use this information to inform biodiversity conservation. I propose to address these questions and their applications to conservation in this grant under two complementary topics. The first is in understanding the factors associated with lakes that alter microclimates and promote disjunct patterns in biota thus informing local climate refugia. This includes measuring and predicting microclimatic and biotic responses along lake shorelines, relating these to existing patterns in relict species, and predicting future change. The second is in understanding how these lakes alter fire history within fire-prone boreal forests of western Canada, including locations of fire refugia and how this regulates the supply of old growth forests and biodiversity. This work will be done through a combination of field and remote sensing studies ultimately providing new insights, understandings, methods, and conservation applications to refugia (fire & climate) and biodiversity within Canada's boreal forest. The grant will also result in training of highly-quality personnel who will contribute towards addressing Canada's commitment to biodiversity protection.