Conservation planning
The NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change has developed a suite of software tools for evaluating regional land-use and management scenarios, in terms of predicted outcomes for terrestrial biodiversity. This software is currently being applied to a wide range of assessment and planning activities across NSW including natural resource management projects (in conjunction with Catchment Management Authorities), Regional Strategy/Regional Conservation Plan development in coastal regions, and Multi-Species Recovery Planning.
While these tools already consider a variety of pressures and threatening processes (e.g. vegetation clearing, urban expansion, grazing, invasive species), they do not yet address potential impacts of climate change. Addition of this capability will provide a very direct and practical mechanism for incorporating consideration of climate change impacts into major land-use and management decisions across the State.
The Department of Environment and Climate Change is undertaking research that will:
- Adapt existing regional conservation planning tools to employ best-available spatial predictions of climate-change induced shifts in the distribution of ‘potential habitat’ for: (i) individual species of special conservation concern; and (ii) vegetation communities as broad surrogates for biodiversity as a whole;
- Further adapt the tools to model likely shifts in the ‘realised distribution’ of species and communities by integrating predictions of potential habitat distribution with best-available estimates of dispersal capability for each species or community (as a function of intervening / connecting habitat and land-use).
- Link the above modelling techniques to the existing capability of the tools to evaluate alternative land-use and management scenarios, thereby facilitating consideration of climate change responses in such evaluation.
- Investigate potential techniques for addressing the uncertainty associated with predictions of climate-change effects into planning and decision-making.
This project will not, in itself, produce information on predicted shifts in potential habitat and estimates of dispersal capability, but will instead draw on best-available information generated by other related activities. The extended tools developed by this project will provide a means of translating information generated by other activities into a form more directly applicable to practical planning and decision-making.
Tools to address impacts on biodiversity conservation planning
Presentation of research at the NSW Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Summit - 23 February 2007: extension of regional conservation planning tools to address potential climate-change impacts on biodiversity.