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Expanding and enhancing protected area networks (PAs) is at the forefront of efforts to conserve and restore global biodiversity but climate change and habitat loss can interact synergistically to undermine the potential benefits of PAs. Targeting conservation, adaptation and mitigation efforts requires understanding climate and land-use patterns within PAs, both currently and under future scenarios. Here, projecting rates of temporal and spatial displacement of climate and land-use revealed that more than one-quarter of the world’s PAs (~27%) are located in regions that will experience both high rates of climate change and land-use change by 2050. Substantial changes are expected to occur more often within PAs distributed across tropical moist and grassland biomes, which currently host diverse tetrapods and vascular plants, and fall into less-stringent management categories. Taken together, our findings can inform spatially adaptive natural resource management and actions to achieve sustainable development and biodiversity goals. The authors project future rates of temporal and spatial displacement of climate and land-use in protected areas (PAs), and show that more than one-quarter of the world’s PAs are highly threatened, with particular risk to PAs across tropical moist and grassland biomes.

Rapid growth in the digitisation of the world’s natural history collections substantially simplifies scientific access to taxonomic and biogeographic information. Despite recent efforts to collate more than two centuries of biodiversity inventories into comprehensive databases, these collections suffer limitations across spatial, temporal and taxonomic dimensions. We assessed taxonomic shortfalls in preserved specimens from 296 plant families native to Australia, for which records have been collated into the Australasian Virtual Herbarium (AVH), specifically addressing the following questions: (1) Based on the number of specimen records per species, which Australian native plant families are under- or over-represented in the collection of preserved specimens digitised in the AVH? (2) To what extent does the distribution of collectors among plant families, or the area occupied by plant families, explain patterns of taxonomic representativeness? We found that the number of preserved specimens per family is not proportional to the family’s known species richness. For 29% of Australia’s plant families (i.e. 86), the number of digitised records constitutes

Societal Impact Statement Urban forests are recognized for the multiple benefits they provide to city‐dwellers. However, climate change will affect tree species survival and persistence in urban ecosystems. Tree failures will cause economic losses and jeopardize the delivery of societal benefits. The impacts of climate change will depend on the species’ resilience and adaptive capacity, as well as management actions which may ameliorate some of the negative impacts. Here, we assessed the potential vulnerability of Australia's urban forests to climate extremes. Our results can be used for future urban planning aiming to incorporate species that are well‐adapted to the hotter, drier climates expected with climate change. Summary Urban forests (UFs) are recognized for the multiple benefits they provide to city‐dwellers. However, global climate change—particularly predicted increases in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves and drought—will affect tree species’ performance and survival in urban ecosystems. Here, we assessed species composition and potential vulnerability of UFs in 22 Australian significant urban areas (SUAs) to heat and/or moisture stress. We quantified species’ realized climatic niches across their known distribution, and assessed the extent to which baseline climate in the SUAs where a particular species is planted fell within its niche. We used three environmental variables to group species based on their potential climate vulnerability. UFs varied in species composition and climate vulnerability across the continent. In general, neither climate similarity nor geographical proximity were good predictors of species composition among UFs. Of 1,342 tree species assessed (68.4% natives), 53% were considered potentially vulnerable to heat and/or moisture stress in at least one city where they are currently planted. Our results highlight the climate vulnerability of current plantings across Australian SUAs and can be used to direct future species selection that considers the species’ climate of origin and climatic niche. UF planning can incorporate species from SUAs with similar climates and with low vulnerability to contemporary, as well as future climate conditions. Species with high climate vulnerability, in contrast, may require more intensive management to avoid failure under future hotter, drier climate conditions.

Protected areas are the primary strategy for maintaining natural landscapes and separating biodiversity features from preventable anthropogenic threats. The Convention on Biological Diversity calls for the coverage of at least 17% of land by protected areas, and the strategic prioritization of important biodiversity areas. Using the spatially explicit reserve design software, Marxan, this study combines climate refugia modelled under future climates in the year 2070 and bioregions to identify priority sites for protected area expansion under climate change in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Priority sites for new protected areas that meet bioregion and climate refugia targets were identified in central-western, northeast and patches of southeast NSW. Seven existing parks, including Kosciuszko National Park, overlapped with regions identified repeatedly as climate refugia under 12 future climate scenarios. The recommendations from this study support policy-makers in prioritizing the protection of biodiversity under a changing and uncertain climate.

Addressing climate change risks requires collaboration and engagement across all sectors of society. In particular, effective partnerships are needed between research scientists producing new knowledge, policy-makers and practitioners who apply conservation actions on the ground. We describe the implementation of a model for increasing the application and useability of biodiversity research in climate adaptation policy and practice. The focus of the program was to increase the ability of a state government agency and natural resource practitioners in Australia to manage and protect biodiversity in a changing climate. The model comprised a five-stage process for enhancing impact (i) initiation of research projects that addressed priority conservation policy and management issues; (ii) co-design of the research using a collaborative approach involving multiple stakeholders; (iii) implementation of the research and design of decision tools and web-based resources; (iv) collaborative dissemination of the tools and resources via government and community working groups; and (v) evaluation of research impact. We report on the model development and implementation, and critically reflect on the model's impact. We share the lessons learnt from the challenges of operating within a stakeholder group with diverse objectives and criteria for success, and provide a template for creating an environmental research program with real world impact.

Expanding protected area networks and enhancing their capacities is currently one avenue at the forefront of efforts to conserve and restore global biodiversity. Climate and habitat loss resulting from land use interact synergistically to undermine the potential benefits of protected areas (PAs). Targeting conservation, adaptation and mitigation efforts requires an understanding of patterns of climate and land-use change within the current arrangement of PAs, and how these might change in the future. In this paper, we provide this understanding using predicted rates of temporal and spatial displacement of future climate and land use globally and within PAs. We show that ~ 47% of the world’s PAs—10.6% of which are under restrictive management—are located in regions that will likely experience both climate stress and land-use instability by 2050. The vast majority of these PAs are also distributed across moist biomes and in high conservation value regions, and fall into less-restrictive management categories. The differential impacts of combined land use and climate velocity across protected biomes indicate that climate and land-use change may have fundamentally different ecological and management consequences at multiple scales. Taken together, our findings can inform spatially adaptive natural resource management and actions to achieve sustainable development and biodiversity goals.

Among the many causes of habitat loss, urbanization coupled with climate change has produced some of the greatest local extinction rates and has led to the loss of many native species. Managing native vegetation in a rapidly expanding urban setting requires land management strategies that are cognizant of these impacts and how species and communities may adapt to a future climate. Here, we demonstrate how identifying climate refugia for threatened vegetation communities in an urban matrix can be used to support management decisions by local government authorities under the dual pressures of urban expansion and climate change. This research was focused on a local government area in New South Wales, Australia, that is undergoing significant residential, commercial and agricultural expansion resulting in the transition of native forest to other more intensive land-uses. Our results indicate that the key drivers of change from native vegetation to urban and agriculture classes were population density and the proximity to urban areas. We found two of the most cleared vegetation community types are physically restricted to land owned or managed by council, suggesting their long-term ecological viability is uncertain under a warming climate. We propose that land use planning decisions must recognize the compounding spatial and temporal pressures of urban development, land clearing and climate change, and how current policy responses, such as biodiversity offsetting, can respond positively to habitat shifts in order to secure the longevity of important ecological communities.

Myrtle rust (Austropuccinia psidii) is an invasive rust fungus that attacks species of the Myrtaceae family, one of the most dominant plant families in Australia. The potential extent of myrtle rust affected areas and the high number of potential host species make a species prioritisation scheme essential to direct conservation and management efforts. This study builds on previous work by: compiling an up-to-date list of myrtle rust occurrences and host species; mapping current and future climate suitability for myrtle rust; and identifying host species at risk based on range overlaps and susceptibility data. Suitable habitat for myrtle rust is restricted to eastern and southern coastal areas of Australia, with minor areas in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. This coastal distribution remains present under future climates, with some extension in inland New South Wales and Tasmania, and a reduction of suitable habitat in northern Queensland and Western Australia. Contrary to previous studies, our results indicate that south-west Western Australia has low climatic suitability for myrtle rust. Under current climate, 1285 Myrtaceae species are at risk of exposure to myrtle rust. This number decreases to 1224 species under future climate. We divide species exposed to myrtle rust into three priority categories, giving highest priority to species with at least 70% of their range overlapping regions climatically suitable for myrtle rust under current or future climates. We find 23 species are of high priority for conservation action. Finally, we provide a series of recommendations for management of species within each priority category.

Globally, local governments are increasing investment in urban greening projects. However, there is little consideration of whether the species being planted will be resilient to climate change. We assessed the distribution of climatically suitable habitat, now and in the future, for 176 tree species native to Australia, commonly planted across Australia's Significant Urban Areas (SUAs) and currently grown by commercial nurseries. Species' occurrence records were obtained from inventories and herbaria, globally and across Australia, and combined with baseline climate data (WorldClim, 1960-1990) and six climate scenarios for 2030 and 2070 using climatic suitability models (CSMs). CSMs for each species were calibrated and projected onto baseline and future scenarios. We calculated changes in the size of climatically suitable habitat for each species across each SUA, and identified urban areas that are likely to have suitable climate for either fewer or more of our study species under future climate. By 2070, climatically suitable habitat in SUAs is predicted to decline for 73% of species assessed. For 18% of these species, climatically suitable area is predicted to be more than halved, relative to their baseline extent. Generally, for urban areas in cooler regions, climatically suitable habitat is predicted to increase. By contrast, for urban areas in warmer regions, a greater proportion of tree species may lose climatically suitable habitat. Our results highlight changing patterns of urban climatic space for commonly planted species, suggesting that local governments and the horticultural industry should take a proactive approach to identify new climate-ready species for urban plantings.

Advances in computing power and infrastructure, increases in the number and size of ecological and environmental datasets, and the number and type of data collection methods, are revolutionizing the field of Ecology. To integrate these advances, virtual laboratories offer a unique tool to facilitate, expedite, and accelerate research into the impacts of climate change on biodiversity. We introduce the uniquely cloud-based Biodiversity and Climate Change Virtual Laboratory (BCCVL), which provides access to numerous species distribution modelling tools; a large and growing collection of biological, climate, and other environmental datasets; and a variety of experiment types to conduct research into the impact of climate change on biodiversity.Users can upload and share datasets, potentially increasing collaboration, cross-fertilisation of ideas, and innovation among the user community. Feedback confirms that the BCCVL's goals of lowering the technical requirements for species distribution modelling, and reducing time spent on such research, are being met. BCCVL facilitates and expedites modelling of climate change's impact on biodiversity.BCCVL integrates numerous species distribution modelling tools and myriad datasets.BCCVL negates the need for advanced programming and modelling expertise.BCCVL allows for increases in productivity and complexity of experimental design.BCCVL facilitates the sharing of data promoting transparency in the research process.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper.

Climate change vulnerability assessment (CCVA) has become a mainstay conservation decision support tool. CCVAs are recommended to incorporate three elements of vulnerability – exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity – yet, lack of data frequently leads to the latter being excluded. Further, weighted or unweighted scoring schemes, based on expert opinion, may be applied. Comparisons of these approaches are rare. In a CCVA for 17 Australian lizard species, we show that membership within three vulnerability categories (low, medium and high) generally remained similar regardless of the framework or scoring scheme. There was one exception however, where, under the warm/dry scenario for 2070, including adaptive capacity lead to five fewer species being classified as highly vulnerable. Two species, Eulamprus leuraensis and E. kosciuskoi, were consistently ranked the most vulnerable, primarily due to projected losses in climatically suitable habitat, narrow thermal tolerance and specialist habitat requirements. Our findings provide relevant information for prioritizing target species for conservation and choosing appropriate conservation actions. We conclude that for the species included in this study, the framework and scoring scheme used had little impact on the identification of the most vulnerable species. We caution, however, that this outcome may not apply to other taxa or regions.

Aim Species distribution models are an invaluable tool for anticipating the potential range of invasive species. These models often improve when both native and non-native occurrences are available for model development and validation. Therefore, how might ecologists anticipate the potential distributions for emerging invasive species that lack any or abundant non-native range occurrences? Here, we evaluate the recent suggestion of transferring niche shifts from well-established ‘avatar’ invaders to emerging invaders by testing if ensemble niche shifts from a group of globally invasive plants improve model predictions when each of these species is iteratively treated as an ‘emerging’ invader. Location Global. Methods We built species distribution models using Mahalanobis distance and four climatic predictors (maximum and minimum temperature and precipitation) for 26 invasive terrestrial plants from an Australian priority list of weeds. Models using only native range occurrences for each species were modified with avatar niche shifts from the remaining ensemble of 25 species based on both a typical (median) niche shift and a large (extreme) niche shift (or niche expansion). Native range and both median and extreme avatar models were then compared with total range models (developed with both native and non-native occurrences) for performance by measures of discrimination and an approximation of calibration. Results Avatar niche shifts reduced errors of omission for known non-native occurrences relative to native range models, with a trade-off of increased errors of commission of lesser magnitude. Further, our approximation of model calibration measured relative to total range models improved with avatar niche shifts. Differences between native range and avatar models were most pronounced for the larger ‘extreme’ avatar niche shifts (or expansion) based on increased niche size and decreased (towards 0) covariance among climatic axes. Main conclusions We suggest that researchers and managers evaluating risk of invasion of their jurisdiction by emerging data-poor invaders modify native range models with observed avatar niche shifts from ensembles of well-studied invaders. Alternative implementations of the avatar invader concept are discussed and research needs for methodological improvements proposed. Despite these opportunities for improved implementation of avatar niche shifts, ample evidence now supports that researchers should expect models based on only native ranges to underestimate or misrepresent the total range for data-poor emerging invaders. Avatar niche shifts (and specifically expansion) from well-studied species offer a precautionary means to anticipate the extent to which native range models may underestimate total ranges.

Ecological niche models (ENMs) have multiple applications in ecology, evolution and conservation planning. They relate the known locations of a species to characteristics of its environment (usually climate) over its geographical range. Most ENMs are trained using standard 30-year (1961–1990) or 50-year (1951–2000) baselines to represent current climate conditions. Species occurrence records used as input to the models, however, are frequently collected from time periods that differ from those from which the climate is derived. Since climate variability can be significant within and outside baselines, and the distributions of some plants and animals (e.g., annual plants, insects) can adjust to environmental conditions on much shorter time scales, this mismatch between collection records and climatic baselines may affect the utility and accuracy of model outputs. We investigated how the choice of baseline periods influenced modelling efforts, anticipating that climate baselines derived from the same temporal period as the species records would yield improved ENMs. Ten simulated species’ distributions were modelled using an ENM (Maxent) for (a) occurrences and climates within the same temporal period, based on eighteen 10-year baselines within the 20th century and (b) all available samples and climate baselines from 1951–2000 and 1961–1990. Each model was projected onto all the available 10-year climate scenarios and compared to the models trained on the corresponding scenario. We show that temporal mismatches of species occurrences and climate baselines can result in significantly poorer distribution models. Such temporal mismatch may be unavoidable for many studies, but we emphasize here the need to match the time range of samples and climate data whenever possible.

In the version of this Perspective originally published, affiliations 1 and 4 ware incorrect, and should have read: “1Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems CRC, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia” and “4Centre for Water, Climate and Land (CWCL), University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia”. These have been corrected in the online versions of this Perspective.