Management for network diversity speeds evolutionary adaptation to climate change

Ecosystems around the world are reorganizing due to climate change(1), motivating management responses to facilitate species persistence and maintain ecological functions. Spatial management actions are generally undertaken to relieve local stressors on populations and have recently been suggested as an approach to facilitate species range shifts, provide refugia and enhance resilience to climate change(2,3). Efforts to identify which habitats to protect, however, typically assume that organisms do not evolve in response to shifting environmental conditions(4,5) despite growing evidence that rapid evolutionary responses occur under new selective regimes in the wild(6,7). It is not clear whether conservation strategies would be different if evolutionary dynamics were considered during conservation planning. Here, we show that evolutionary responses fundamentally change recommendations for conservation actions. With spatially explicit simulations of a simple three-species coral reef ecosystem, we show that the preferred management strategies changed from those focusing on thermal refugia when evolutionary capacity was absent to those prioritizing trait and habitat diversity or high cover when adaptive evolution was possible. Prioritizing habitat diversity protects heat resistant populations and protects cooler refuges and the stepping stones between them. The protection of habitat heterogeneity and connectivity also produced substantially larger benefits outside reserves than refugia-based strategies, providing conservation planners an opportunity to facilitate adaptation to ongoing and unpredictable change.