Southern California
A large, clear stream meanders across our view, its banks dotted with reed-like ckumps of vegetation. A beautiful, snowless mountain stands in the background, while a small flock of birds flies high above a grassy plain between the mountain and stream.
Emerson Parcel Tidal Marsh, located in northern California’s Marsh Creek delta, which drains a large area on the east side of Mt. Diablo.
Photo credit: US Fish and Wildlife, California Coastal Conservancy
Southern California
In the United States, California is the third largest state by area and largest by population. The state's borders contain an incredibly diverse array of habitats, species, and ecosystems. Many of these species are only found in California, like the salt marsh harvest mouse (Reithrodontomys raviventris) and San Francisco Manzanita (Arctostaphylos franciscana), a rare flowering shrub.
A salt marsh harvest mouse - a small, light brown mouse with inky black eyes and small ears - perches on some pickleweed. This endangered mouse is found only in salt marsh habitat around the San Francisco Bay Estuary and, with some exception, the Suisun Bay area of California.
California, USA
Photo: © rlescalleet on iNaturalist, some rights reserved (CC-BY-NC)
A shrub with bright green, glossy, oblong leaves gleams in bright sunlight. Several small, crabapple-like fruits, colored pale green and pink, protrude from the top of one twig.
San Francisco Manzanita is a rare shrub known only from the stretch of hills between Mount Davidson and the Presidio. Once locally abundant, it is now protected as an endangered species. The “Franciscan manzanita”, as it is also known, was actually considered extinct in the wild for seven decades until one individual was discovered in 2009. (NPS article, Jan 2018)
Photo credit: Shelly Estelle/Presidio Trust
The great diversity of California's landscape and ecosystems thus allows for many opportunities to investigate a wide range of climate refugia within the state.
The Connecting Wildlands and Communities project team of the Climate Science Alliance has made a helpful interactive map viewer that shows the data for each “domain of refugia” that they were able to link for Southern California systems.
Sub-Regions
Past Statewide-focus meetings
CA LCP climate Refugia workshop - Jan. 10, 2023
On January 10, 2023, the California Landscape Conservation Partnership (CA LCP) held a virtual workshop to introduce and discuss applications of climate change refugia. Attendees came from many ecology- and conservation- centered roles, and organizations represented included: the American Bird Conservancy, Conservation Biology Institute, Point Blue Conservation Science, Conservation Science Partners, Accelerate Climate Adaptation Consultants, and state and federal agencies like the California Dept of Water Resource, CA Dept of Fish and Wildlife, CA Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, USGS, US Fish & Wildlife, and Bureau of Reclamation.
The goals of the workshop were to:
Achieve a common understanding of how the concepts of refugia or refugial capacity can advance climate-adapted conservation planning
Enable steering committee members to envision how these concepts align with the CA LCP’s mission and goals and how the concepts could fit into their ongoing work
Identify opportunities as well as key constraints or pinch points that affect how we operationalize the application of concepts like refugia
Develop a written science synthesis document - climate-adapted refugia: why, what for, and at what scales?
Led by Dr. Megan Jennings from the CA LCP Steering Committee, attendees first reflected on what their pre-workshop knowledge and perspectives on climate refugia were. Notably, practically all attendees had a basic understanding of what climate refugia are and why these places can be useful to their own work in conservation, restoration, etc.
Next, the workshop group discussed different definitions of climate refugia and how differences can impact the way refugia are used in conservation.
This was followed by 5-min. "lightning" presentations from researchers whose past/current work demonstrated the application of climate refugia:
After an insightful Q&A session and break, the workshop group split into two breakout rooms to discuss attendees' thoughts on the following: Did the examples presented align with any of your work? What decision or planning efforts could benefit from applying the concepts of climate adapted refugia? What work are you already doing or what work needs to be done? How might scale differ with those different applications? How well are climate considerations being incorporated? What are the barriers to operationalizing climate adapted conservation (from planning to implementation)?
To conclude the workshop, a representative from each breakout room reported back to the entire workshop group on key points they heard.
From Group 1 (led by Claudia Mengelt, USGS): Definition of climate refugia is shifting and thus might make it hard to see application. Using climate refugia would be highly helpful since there is definitely a tendency to just "implement, implement, implement ASAP, without imagining future changes (including climate change)" We should define the future state that we are restoring to before we begin even making restoration decisions: managers can use a checklist
From Group 2 (led by Toni Lyn Morelli, USGS): “Champions” are key to implementing climate refugia concepts into current projects across the board; they are especially key to bringing in climate change refugia application to other fields, like infrastructure sector (and other sectors that often don’t think about climate change refugia); using climate refugia as a management tool could/should be more than a checklist - instead, a matrix of space and time (a dynamic patchwork modeled by computer simulations). USGS Decision Support tools (in a presentation at National Wildlife Society) are great examples of co-production of tools to use in decision making.
Recap and next steps: Test out climate change refugia checklist/dynamic patchwork idea as described in Group 1 (and Group 2).
relevant publications
Rojas, I.M., et. al. 2022. A landscape-scale framework to identify refugia from multiple stressors. Conservation Biology. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13834.