Quantifying and assessing the need and potential for assisted migration

2018

Assisted migration (AM) has been suggested as a conservation strategy for aiding species to reach newly suitable locations as climate changes. The magnitude of decrease in range size and the extent of emerging new areas can be used to guide decisions on the applicability of AM. However, before our studies it had not been formalized how predictions of changes in suitable areas, acquired using e.g. species distribution models (SDMs) or expert assessments, should translate into management decisions. We presented a conceptual framework for identifying situations in which projections from such predictions indicate that a species could benefit from AM. We translated predicted changes in suitable …