Predicting the effectiveness of protected areas of Natura 2000 under climate change

BackgroundProtected areas (PAs) are aimed to hold the environmental conditions that facilitate species and ecosystems to persist. PAs can become climatically unsuitable and unable to sustain their current number of species under climate change. The Natura 2000 (N2K) is the largest coordinated conservation tool assigned to maintain the long-term survival of Europe's most significant species and habitats. In attempting to understand the effectiveness of PAs in the face of climate change scenarios, we tested two hypotheses: (1) PAs in the Alpine and the Boreal biogeographical regions will experience more newly emerged climate conditions (hotter and drier) compared to the climate representation of other biogeographical regions under future climate in Europe and (2) PAs in the Mediterranean and the Continental biogeographical regions will face more consistency in climate conditions due to less area of disappearing and novel climate in future.MethodsCurrent climate data (1960-1990) and projections for 2050 and 2070 of PAs of N2K were extracted from WorldClim global climate data. Principal components analysis (PCA) was performed to construct climate space for the PAs across the biogeographical regions based on 19 climatic variables assessed at 5-km resolution. ArcMap 10.1 was used to map the location of the novel and disappearing climates.ResultsPAs in the Alpine region will experience more novel climate conditions in the future compared to other biogeographical regions. The future projections showed that 17.70% of the PAs in the Alpine region will experience novel climate by 2070. Considerable climate consistency was observed in the PAs in the Continental region compared to the other biogeographical regions. Our results showed that about 176km(2) of the selected PAs in the Continental region will face new emerging climate, while about 110km(2) will disappear under RCP 8.5 scenario. The prediction also revealed that in the Mediterranean region 08 PAs will experience novel climate and 786km(2) areas in these PAs will face disappearing climate by 2070. We found that fewer areas of PAs in the Boreal regions will experience disappearing climate in both the scenarios.ConclusionsThe portion of novel climate conditions can be seen as a future opportunity to assign new reserves for the species. Our study highlights the importance of conservation planning to increase the connectivity between PAs, identifying novel conservation zones to maximize representation of habitats during the emerging climatic changes as well as designing strategies, management, and monitoring of the individual PAs.