Client: Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources

Year: 2022 - Present

Focus Area: Ecosystem Services (Wildlife Habitat)

Tools: SyncroSim, Prioritizr SyncroSim

 

Project Overview

Over millennia, biodiversity has persisted through periods of changing climate by retreating to areas of retained suitable climates, called climate refugia. In the face of ongoing climate change, the identification and protection of climate refugia has become a priority for minimizing threats to biodiversity and ensuring species will have safe havens to retreat to. Of heightened vulnerability are species with narrow niches and limited dispersal ability, such as cold-water species. However, current methodologies for identifying and prioritizing climate refugia are largely terrestrial-centric.

We are addressing this gap in climate refugia methodologies with the development of a novel multi-criteria and cross-scale approach to identify and prioritize climate refugia in aquatic ecosystems. We initially conducted a ‘proof of concept’ analysis to select climate refugia lakes using prioritizr, an R package for systematic conservation planning. Data selection was done in collaboration with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (OMNR), aiming to capture the uniqueness of aquatic ecosystems while considering the potential cascading effects of the surrounding landscape.

We later developed the Prioritizr SyncroSim package that created a graphical user interface for the prioritizr R package, offering a more user-friendly alternative for systematic conservation planning (Fig. 1). Within SyncroSim, coding is optional, and users can choose to run their analyses through point-and-click interaction and benefit from easy scenario management, thereby broadening the adoption of the approach within OMNR. The added value of comparing and sharing prioritization results online through SyncroSim Cloud will also further support decision-making processes by OMNR (Fig. 2).

We recently extended the tool by including the ability to consider multiple cost surfaces in a prioritization process. The tool now supports using multiple cost layers, letting users account for different types of costs (e.g., acquisition or restoration) in one analysis. With Prioritizr SyncroSim, this can be done in two easy steps: 1) setting up a basic prioritization problem by defining goals, data, and constraints; and 2) optionally running a multi-cost prioritization using either a hierarchical or equal-weighted approach to minimize costs across all layers. For more information, see the step-by-step tutorials covering key features of the tool.

Currently, we are in the process of making final user experience improvements to the tool, and will deliver a workshop to OMNR staff based on an updated set of tutorials that will cover the complete workflow for climate refugia prioritization, from data selection and pre-processing to model delivery.