On Friday the 18th we discussed a paper by Beier and Brost (2009) which talks about the use of land facets to plan for climate change. The idea behind the paper is interesting and relevant: Given the myriad of uncertainty related to modelling the expected species distribution shifts, why not protect high diversity of physical landscape units which are easier and reliable to bap and would, hopefully, capture large numbers of biodiversity. The idea is that heterogeneous environments would always support higher number of species and enhance biological and evolutionary processes, even when species themselves change due global processes such as climate change. This idea is not new, and was first suggested by Hunter et al. as long as 22 years ago (1988).
The topic truly is attractive, but the paper ended up being a slight disappointment. Beier and Brost are excellent writers and the text summarizes nicely a decent amount of literature, but focussing strictly on land facets and limited variables (mainly topography and soil) the authors fail to bring together the whole story. Many important aspects are unfortunately left out and the text does not discuss factors such as changes in climatic diversity, gradients, quality of land facets of same class, scales and spatial patterns. The true connection between land facets and species richness or biological processes is only touched upon and we would have liked to see more comprehensive meta-analyses or studies addressing these questions. For example, are there studies with historical range shifts looking at the linkages of land facets and community compositions? Do certain land facets promote biological processes better than others?
All in all, despite the interesting and important aspect, we do not see that this paper would contribute anything new to the group of studies using land facets to prioritize across present species distributions only.
Link to the paper:
Beier, P. & Brost, B. (2009) Use of land facets to plan for climate change: Conserving the arenas, not the actors. – Cons. Biol. 24(3): 701-710.