A quantitative approach for the design of robust and cost-effective conservation policies under uncertain climate change: The case of grasshopper conservation in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.

Climate is a major determinant of the world's distribution of biodiversity and species ranges are expected to shift as the climate changes. For conservation policies to be cost-effective in the long run these changes need to be taken into account. To some extent, policies can be adapted over time, but transaction costs, lock-in effects and path dependence limit the extent to which such adaptation is possible. Thus it is desirable that conservation policies be designed so that they are cost-effective in the long run even without future adaptations. Given that the future climate change is highly uncertain, the policies need to be robust to climatic uncertainty. In this paper we present an approach for the robustness analysis with regard to the cost-effectiveness of conservation policies in the face of uncertain climate change. The approach is applied to the conservation of a grasshopper species in the German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein. For the assessment of the cost-effectiveness of considered policies we develop a climate-ecological-economic model. We show that in the near future all considered policies have a similar level of robustness, while in the more distant future the policies differ substantially in their robustness and a trade-off emerges between the expected performance and robustness of a policy.

Correction to: A novel method for assessing climate change impacts in ecotron experiments.

The article was published bearing a typographical error to the second author name listed. The author group regret the error and the name should be referenced and credited as Jakob Zscheischler and not the former.

A novel method for assessing climate change impacts in ecotron experiments.

Ecotron facilities allow accurate control of many environmental variables coupled with extensive monitoring of ecosystem processes. They therefore require multivariate perturbation of climate variables, close to what is observed in the field and projections for the future. Here, we present a new method for creating realistic climate forcing for manipulation experiments and apply it to the UHasselt Ecotron experiment. The new methodology uses data derived from the best available regional climate model projection and consists of generating climate forcing along a gradient representative of increasingly high global mean air temperature anomalies. We first identified the best-performing regional climate model simulation for the ecotron site from the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment in the European domain (EURO-CORDEX) ensemble based on two criteria: (i) highest skill compared to observations from a nearby weather station and (ii) representativeness of the multi-model mean in future projections. The time window is subsequently selected from the model projection for each ecotron unit based on the global mean air temperature of the driving global climate model. The ecotron units are forced with 3-hourly output from the projections of the 5-year period in which the global mean air temperature crosses the predefined values. With the new approach, Ecotron facilities become able to assess ecosystem responses on changing climatic conditions, while accounting for the co-variation between climatic variables and their projection in variability, well representing possible compound events. The presented methodology can also be applied to other manipulation experiments, aiming at investigating ecosystem responses to realistic future climate change.