Protected areas not likely to serve as steppingstones for species undergoing climate-induced range shifts

Species across the planet are shifting their ranges to track suitable climate conditions in response to climate change. Given that protected areas have higher quality habitat and often harbor higher levels of biodiversity compared to unprotected lands, it is often assumed that protected areas can serve as steppingstones for species undergoing climate-induced range shifts. However, there are several factors that may impede successful range shifts among protected areas, including the distance that must be travelled, unfavorable human land uses and climate conditions along potential movement routes, and lack of analogous climates. Through a species-agnostic lens, we evaluate these factors across the global terrestrial protected area network as measures of climate connectivity, which is defined as the ability of a landscape to facilitate or impede climate-induced movement. We found that over half of protected land areas and two-thirds of the number of protected units across the globe are at..., Identifying climate analogs
We followed the methods of Abatzoglou et al. (2020) and Parks et al. (2022) to characterize climate and identify backward and forward climate analogs. The specific climate variables we used were average minimum temperature of the coldest month (Tmin), average maximum temperature of the warmest month (Tmax), annual actual evapotranspiration (AET), and annual climate water deficit (CWD). AET and CWD concurrently account for evaporative demand and availability of water (N. L. Stephenson, 1990). These four variables provide complementary information pertinent to ecological systems and collectively capture the major climatic constraints on species distributions and ecological processes across a range of taxa (Dobrowski et al., 2021; Lutz et al., 2010; Parker & Abatzoglou, 2016; N. Stephenson, 1998; C. M. Williams et al., 2015). Monthly data acquired from TerraClimate (Abatzoglou et al., 2018) were used to produce these annual summaries from 1961-1990 (resoluti..., There are three files in this repository:
1)      backward.analogs - master.table.xlsx – results for backward analogs:
·         Each climate connectivity metric (dispersal exposure, human exposure, climate exposure, and analog exposure) is summarized by country; percent protected lands in each country that exhibit climate connectivity failure is also indicated.  
·         Each climate connectivity metric (dispersal exposure, human exposure, climate exposure, and analog exposure) is summarized by protected area. Values represent the mean pixel-based percentile. Also included is a binary (0, 1) indicator of whether the protected area exhibits climate connectivity failure.
2)      forward.analogs - master.table.xlsx – results for forward analogs:
·         Each climate connectivity metric (dispersal exposure, human exposure, climate exposure, and analog exposure) is summarized by country; percent protected lands in each country that exhibit climate connectivity failure is also indicated....