SYMP 18-2 - Experimental Habitat Restorations as Tests of Climate Change Adaptation Strategies

Dozens of climate change adaptation strategies have been proposed in the literature, and practitioners are already implementing many of these strategies worldwide. However, very few strategies have been tested empirically to determine if and when they will be effective. Hence, conservation agencies could be investing significant resources in strategies that fail to produce the desired results or cause harmful unintended consequences. Rigorous tests of climate change adaptations strategies that ensure more effective future management are necessary to provide an evidence base to support conservation under climate change.

In this presentation we will suggest that rigorous tests of climate change adaptation strategies are likely lacking because of a tradeoff between the time and resources necessary to implement these tests, and the urgent need for action. We will highlight limitations with current recommendations that call for implementing a single action, monitoring for effectiveness, and adapting management practices as necessary. We will then suggest an alternative approach where management actions are designed as experiments to test climate change adaptation strategies without delaying action. Specifically, we will suggest that practitioners employ multiple climate change adaptation strategies simultaneously following the tenets of experimental design, including: replication, randomization, and control treatments. Using this experimental approach will not only provide the evidence necessary to improve future management, it also has many other benefits, including: (1) increasing resilience of the managed system through the portfolio effect, (2) providing tests of our knowledge in climate change biology, (3) helping practitioners and funders overcome the fear of failure by learning from failed actions, (4) resolving stakeholder conflicts, and (5) providing opportunities for highly effective science and management communication. We will conclude by providing two case studies to demonstrate the benefits of taking an experimental approach to test climate change adaptation strategies during ecological restorations: (1) a test of assisted gene flow on mountain summits and (2) a test of assisted migration during wetland restorations.