From a conservation perspective, quantifying potential refugial capacity has been predominantly focused on climate refugia, which is critical for maintaining the persistence of species and ecosystems. However, protection from other stressors, such as human‐induced changes in fire and hydrology, that cause habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation is also necessary to ensure that conservation efforts focused on climate are n...

Aim Plant distributions and vegetation dynamics underpin key global phenomena, including biogeochemical cycling, ecosystem productivity and terrestrial biodiversity patterns. Aggregated and remotely collected ‘big data’ are required to forecast the effects of global change on plant communities. We synthesize advances in developing and exploiting big data in global change plant ecology, and identify challenges to their effectiv...

Aim Forest regeneration data provide an early signal of the persistence and migration of tree species, so we investigated whether species shifts due to climate change exhibit a common signal of response or whether changes vary by species. Location California Floristic Province, United States ; mediterranean biome. Methods We related Forest Inventory and Analysis ( FIA ) data from 2000−07 for 13 tree species to high‐resolution...

Most species face multiple anthropogenic disruptions. Few studies have quantified the cumulative influence of multiple threats on species of conservation concern, and far fewer have quantified the potential relative value of multiple conservation interventions in light of these threats. We linked spatial distribution and population viability models to explore conservation interventions under projected climate change, urbanizat...

Concern over rapid global changes and the potential for interactions among multiple threats are prompting scientists to combine multiple modelling approaches to understand impacts on biodiversity. A relatively recent development is the combination of species distribution models, land‐use change predictions, and dynamic population models to predict the relative and combined impacts of climate change, land‐use change, and altere...

Recent studies suggest that species distribution models ( SDM s) based on fine‐scale climate data may provide markedly different estimates of climate‐change impacts than coarse‐scale models. However, these studies disagree in their conclusions of how scale influences projected species distributions. In rugged terrain, coarse‐scale climate grids may not capture topographically controlled climate variation at the scale that cons...

As a clear consensus is emerging that habitat for many species will dramatically reduce or shift with climate change, attention is turning to adaptation strategies to address these impacts. Assisted colonization is one such strategy that has been predominantly discussed in terms of the costs of introducing potential competitors into new communities and the benefits of reducing extinction risk. However, the success or failure o...

Periodic wildfire is an important natural process in Mediterranean‐climate ecosystems, but increasing fire recurrence threatens the fragile ecology of these regions. Because most fires are human‐caused, we investigated how human population patterns affect fire frequency. Prior research in California suggests the relationship between population density and fire frequency is not linear. There are few human ignitions in areas wit...