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Refugia-based conservation offers long-term effectiveness and minimize uncertainty on strategies for climate change adaptation. We used distribution modelling to identify climate change refugia for 617 terrestrial mammals and to quantify the role of protected areas (PAs) in providing refugia across South America. To do so, we compared species potential distribution across different scenarios of climate change, highlighting those regions likely to retain suitable climatic conditions by year 2090, and explored the proportion of refugia inside PAs. Moist tropical forests in high-elevation areas with complex topography concentrated the highest local diversity of species refugia, although regionally important refugia centers occurred elsewhere. Andean-Amazon forests contained climate change refugia for more than half of the continental species' pool and for up to 87 species locally (17 × 17 km 2 grid cell). The highlands of the southern Atlantic Forest also included megadiverse refugia for up to 76 species per cell. Almost half of the species that may find refugia in the Atlantic Forest will do so in a single region-the Serra do Mar and Serra do Espinhaço. Most of the refugia we identified, however, were not in PAs, which may contain <6% of the total area of climate change refugia, leaving 129-237 species with no refugia inside the territorial limits of PAs of any kind. Our results reveal a dismal scenario for the level of refugia protection in some of the most biodiverse regions of the world. Nonetheless, because refugia tend to be in high-elevation, topographically complex, and remote areas, with lower anthropogenic pressure, formally protecting them may require a comparatively modest investment., (© 2023 Society for Conservation Biology.)

Given the speed at which humans are changing the climate, species with high degrees of endemism may not have time to avoid extinction through adaptation. We investigated through teleconnection analysis the origin of rainfall that determines the phylogenetic diversity of rainforest frogs and the effects of microclimate differences in shaping the morphological traits of isolated populations (which contribute to greater phylogenetic diversity and speciation). We also investigated through teleconnection analysis how deforestation in Amazonia can affect ecosystem services that are fundamental to maintaining the climate of the Atlantic rainforest biodiversity hotspot. Seasonal winds known as flying rivers carry water vapor from Amazonia to the Atlantic Forest, and the breaking of this ecosystem service could lead Atlantic Forest species to population decline and extinction in the short term. Our results suggest that the selection of morphological traits that shape Atlantic Forest frog diversity and their population dynamics are influenced by the Amazonian flying rivers. Our results also suggest that the increases of temperature anomalies in the Atlantic Ocean due to global warming and in the Amazon forest due to deforestation are already breaking this cycle and threaten the biodiversity of the Atlantic Forest hotspot., (© 2022 Society for Conservation Biology.)

Conservation science involves the collection and analysis of data. These scientific practices emerge from values that shape who and what is counted. Currently, conservation data are filtered through a value system that considers native life the only appropriate subject of conservation concern. We examined how trends in species richness, distribution, and threats change when all wildlife count by adding so-called non-native and feral populations to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List and local species richness assessments. We focused on vertebrate populations with founding members taken into and out of Australia by humans (i.e., migrants). We identified 87 immigrant and 47 emigrant vertebrate species. Formal conservation accounts underestimated global ranges by an average of 30% for immigrants and 7% for emigrants; immigrations surpassed extinctions in Australia by 52 species; migrants were disproportionately threatened (33% of immigrants and 29% of emigrants were threatened or decreasing in their native ranges); and incorporating migrant populations into risk assessments reduced global threat statuses for 15 of 18 species. Australian policies defined most immigrants as pests (76%), and conservation was the most commonly stated motivation for targeting these species in killing programs (37% of immigrants). Inclusive biodiversity data open space for dialogue on the ethical and empirical assumptions underlying conservation science., (© 2019 Society for Conservation Biology.)

Island species are difficult to conserve because they face the synergy of climate change, invasive species, deforestation, and increasing human population densities in areas where land mass is shrinking. The Caribbean island of Hispaniola presents particular challenges because of geopolitical complexities that span 2 countries and hinder coordinated management of species across the island. We employed species distribution modeling to evaluate the impacts of climatic change and anthropogenic activities on the distribution of an endemic mammal of conservation concern, the Hispaniolan solenodon (Solenodon paradoxus). We aggregated occurrence points for this poorly known species for the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and the present (1975-2016) based on museum collections, online biodiversity databases, and new field surveys. We quantified degree of overlap between periods and scenarios with Schoener's D. Through a conservation paleobiology lens, we found that over time humans played an increasing role in shaping the distribution of S. paradoxus, thus, providing a foundation for developing conservation strategies on appropriate spatiotemporal scales. Human population density was the single most important predictor of S. paradoxus occurrence. Densities >166 people/km 2 corresponded to a near-zero probability of occurrence. Models that accounted for climate but not anthropogenic variables falsely identified suitable habitat in Haiti, where on-the-ground surveys confirm habitat is unavailable. Climate-only models also significantly overestimated the potential for habitat connectivity between isolated populations. Our work highlights that alternative fates for S. paradoxus in the Anthropocene exist across the political border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti due to the fundamentally different economic and political realities of each country. Relationships in the fossil record confirm that Hispaniola's sociopolitical boundary is not biologically significant but instead represents one imposed on the island's fauna in the past 500 years by colonial activity. Our approach reveals how a paleontological perspective can contribute to concrete management insights., (© 2019 Society for Conservation Biology.)

Establishing protected areas has long been an effective conservation strategy and is often based on readily surveyed species. The potential of any freshwater taxa to be a surrogate for other aquatic groups has not been explored fully. We compiled occurrence data on 72 species of freshwater fishes, amphibians, mussels, and aquatic reptiles for the Great Plains, Wyoming (U.S.A.). We used hierarchical Bayesian multispecies mixture models and MaxEnt models to describe species' distributions and the program Zonation to identify areas of conservation priority for each aquatic group. The landscape-scale factors that best characterized aquatic species' distributions differed among groups. There was low agreement and congruence among taxa-specific conservation priorities (<20%), meaning no surrogate priority areas would include or protect the best habitats of other aquatic taxa. Common, wideranging aquatic species were included in taxa-specific priority areas, but rare freshwater species were not included. Thus, the development of conservation priorities based on a single freshwater aquatic group would not protect all species in the other aquatic groups., (© 2017 Society for Conservation Biology.)

Seabirds are the most threatened group of marine animals; 29% of species are at some risk of extinction. Significant threats to seabirds occur on islands where they breed, but in many cases, effective island conservation can mitigate these threats. To guide island-based seabird conservation actions, we identified all islands with extant or extirpated populations of the 98 globally threatened seabird species, as recognized on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, and quantified the presence of threatening invasive species, protected areas, and human populations. We matched these results with island attributes to highlight feasible island conservation opportunities. We identified 1362 threatened breeding seabird populations on 968 islands. On 803 (83%) of these islands, we identified threatening invasive species (20%), incomplete protected area coverage (23%), or both (40%). Most islands with threatened seabirds are amenable to island-wide conservation action because they are small (57% were <1 km(2) ), uninhabited (74%), and occur in high- or middle-income countries (96%). Collectively these attributes make islands with threatened seabirds a rare opportunity for effective conservation at scale., (© 2014 Society for Conservation Biology.)