Geographic Landscape Visualisation in Planning Adaptation to Climate Change in Victoria, Australia

Abstract

Climate change is a global challenge for all scientists the 21st century with a certain amount of ‘global warming’ already inevitable. The magnitude and risks of climate change are now being more widely appreciated and the need for adaptation, including land use, is becoming a social imperative. Profound changes to ecosystems and biodiversity are predicted, and climate induced migration of biota is envisaged and is already being observed. Although the exact changes remain uncertain, landscapes and biota will be affected at all scales — from the local to sub-continental level. Space for biodiversity to ‘self-adapt’ is required. Maintaining and restoring ecological connectivity and resilience — biolinks — across landscapes are likely to be crucial aspects of adaptation to climate change. This is particularly so across human modified landscapes (e.g. agricultural landscapes) where the environmental legacy of habitat fragmentation and degradation is already a major global conservation issue. Past and current spatial patterns of human land use and management will also be affected by biophysical drivers and human adaptation.

What will be the function, patterns and processes of future landscapes that we bequeath to future generations under climate change? What they look like will be product of societal choices informed by the community’s ‘sense of place’, that now includes biodiversity conservation. Visualisation tools, particularly when accurately linked to Geographic Information Systems, ecological perspectives and realistic photographic libraries, offer powerful facilities to assist the community, scientists, planners and all major stakeholders to plan for new landscapes that consider climate change, including biolinks. These digitally created landscapes that display physical properties of the real world can provide a useful medium for visualising the results from experimenting with outcomes of different management approaches building in biodiversity conservation. ‘Seeing’ can augment meaning and ‘sense of future place’, particularly when linked to a realism derived from ecology. This chapter examines the use and potential of various visualisation tools as part of the emerging debate about biodiversity and adaptation to climate change in south-eastern Australia.