Management for climate change

It is therefore essential to incorporate climate change considerations into species conservation planning and ensure that planning is climate-smart (Maxted et al., 2013; Stein and Moser, 2014).

For in situ conservation this may mean:

• accommodating predicted plant distribution range shifts when selecting new areas for active conservation (as highlighted by Maxted et al., 2013; Aguirre-Gutiérrez et al., 2017).
• upgrading the current.
• highly static protected area system to incorporate both current and future projected distributions (Midgley et al., 2002).
• selecting areas where species persistence is unlikely to be negatively affected (Maxted et al., 2013; Magos Brehm et al., in prep.).

For ex situ conservation it may mean:

• prioritizing for urgent collection those populations that are likely to be negatively affected by climate change and/or those at the edge of species distributions to capture the genetic diversity that is under threat (Maxted et al., 2013; Magos Brehm et al., in prep.).
• to regularly collect CWR germplasm from key sites to assess changes and their causes over time.

What if a target CWR population in a genetic reserve is vulnerable to mid- or long-term effects of climate change?
How can you design and implement a climate-smart management plan? What management strategies can be  adopted?

Ideally populations will migrate to favourable conditions, or populations will show short-term resilience via phenotypic plasticity or longer term adaptive evolutionary responses. However, if these are not viable options, then yes, the CWR may go extinct but hopefully the conservation strategy designed initially would be sufficiently robust to ensure that ‘all the conservation eggs were not placed in the same basket’. This means that, although the number of populations of each CWR taxon that should be designated for conservation may vary (for example between self-pollinated and cross-pollinated taxa), and whenever genetic information is lacking, populations that occur in diverse ecogeographic conditions should be targeted. Therefore, the loss of any one population will not jeopardize on-going in situ conservation and if one population is lost another can be nominated to replace that population in the network (Maxted et al., 2013).