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Evaluating climate-driven fallowing for ecological connectivity of species at risk

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Abstract

Context

Climate change and agricultural land use change are modifying the configuration of natural lands within agricultural landscapes, impacting species’ ability to move freely between remaining (semi-)natural areas. Working lands are inherently costly to set aside for biodiversity, making the establishment of additional permanent reserves that facilitate connectivity challenging. Yet, even temporary increases in connectivity may enable increased gene flow with long-term benefits for species health and persistence.

Objectives

Here we explore the potential for dynamic conservation reserves, in the form of either temporarily or semi-permanently fallowed croplands, to increase connectivity in intensive agricultural regions.

Methods

We evaluate the potential for fallowed lands to facilitate functional habitat connectivity for an at-risk species in the San Joaquin Valley, an intensive agricultural landscape in California, USA. We perform landscape connectivity analyses to examine how drought-induced fallowing between 2011 and 2017 may have impacted connectivity within Kern County for the endangered San Joaquin kit fox (Vulpes macrotis mutica).

Results

We found that an increase in fallowed lands from 2011 to 2015/2017 in Kern County likely corresponded to increased functional connectivity for the kit fox, including significant decreases in cumulative cost to distance traveled (~ 0.8 to 18% and 0.3 to 12.2% in 2015/2017 respective to 2011 across different model scenarios). These significant reductions indicate that cumulative energy costs incurred by kit foxes traveling between core habitats likely decreased with an increase in fallowing, with the estimated benefits from semi-permanently fallowed lands on average 2.4 times greater than for more temporarily fallowed lands.

Conclusions

Our results highlight that opportunistic and dynamic conservation actions have the potential to reduce conflict between biodiversity preservation and agricultural production in working landscapes by increasing landscape connectivity via temporarily or semi-permanently fallowed parcels. Agri-environmental programs incentivizing the creation of dynamic, fallowing-based reserves could help landowners manage reduced groundwater availability while improving species’ mobility in the face of climate change.

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Data availability

FAM data was supplied by Forrest Melton upon request. All other data is publicly downloadable from the sources cited, and processed in the manner described in the Methods and SI Methods.

Code availability

Code is available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Forrest Melton at the NASA Ames Research Center Cooperative for Research in Earth Science and Technology and NASA Applied Sciences Program and Western Water Applications Office for sharing the NASA-USGS-USDA Fallowed Area Mapping (FAM) project data and providing comments on this manuscript. Additionally, we would like to thank our editor and all of our reviewers for their thorough and constructive comments, which helped us to improve the quality of this manuscript.

Funding

SM was supported in part by the Four-Year Fellowship program at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. CP was supported in part by the Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology (IQ Biology) Ph.D. program at the BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado Boulder. AEL acknowledges support from the US National Science Foundation (No. 2042526) and the US Department of Agriculture (No. 2022-67019-36397).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bren School of Environmental Sciences and Management, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Sofie McComb, L. Claire Powers & Ashley E. Larsen

  2. Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Sofie McComb

  3. Environmental Studies and Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology Programs, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    L. Claire Powers

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SM and AL conceptualized and designed the study. Material preparation and data collection were performed by SM, and supported by Forrest Melton with regards to supplying Fallow Area Mapping data. SM, AL, and CP performed the formal analysis and investigation, and contributed to the first draft of the manuscript. All authors reviewed and edited previous versions of the manuscript, and read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Sofie McComb.

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McComb, S., Powers, L.C. & Larsen, A.E. Evaluating climate-driven fallowing for ecological connectivity of species at risk. Landsc Ecol 37, 3059–3077 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-022-01522-9

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