Conservation planning is a tricky exercise where all efforts are stale nearly the moment one arrives at results. Integrating climate projections into this practice involves high levels of uncertainty, as we can’t be sure what will be in the areas we protect, or whether what we intend to protect will still be contained by our protected area in the future. Biodiversity does not always act as we predict, as exemplified in this presentation by the inclusion of New Zealand’s radiata pine plantations, which have substantial biodiversity despite being an introduced species and homogeneous in character.

There are several frameworks which have been developed to help meet this challenge. Some involve anticipating novel stressors and predicting cumulative effects; others focus on identifying refugia, where biodiversity can retreat to and persist in. This presentation dealt more with the latter – Dr.  Burton emphasized the persistence of systems in their capacity to absorb disturbance. He defined ecological resilience as a function of latitude, resistance, precariousness, and adaptive capacity.

Dr. Burton’s suggestions for managing this issue in relation to forest resilience can be applied more broadly in conservation area design; using biogeoclimatic envelopes to predict novel climates is a potential method for my Masters research. Incorporating this temporal continuity as an aspect of connectivity will be important for predicting the movement of species we intend to protect (“biological legacy retention”), but it was interesting to hear Dr. Burton also suggest this as a strategy for preventing the spread of unwanted or invasive species to new areas.

If I had one critique, it would be the Dr. Burton’s presentation contained a section which was heavy in jargon and abbreviation from forestry that was less accessible for those in attendance without that specific knowledge.

In the question session, Dr. Burton was thorough in both repeating the questions asked and answering them succinctly and completely. As this research is applicable to mine, I intend to follow up with questions about the scalability of this approach.