Data from: Compensatory conservation measures for an endangered caribou population under climate change

Future human land use and climate change may disrupt movement behaviors of
terrestrial animals, thereby altering the ability of individuals to move
across a landscape. Some of the expected changes result from processes
whose effects will be difficult to alter, such as global climate change.
We present a novel framework in which we use models to (1) identify the
ecological changes from these difficult-to-alter processes, as well as (2)
the potential conservation measures that are best able to compensate for
these changes. We illustrated this framework with the case of an
endangered caribou population in Québec, Canada. We coupled a spatially
explicit individual-based movement model with a range of landscape
scenarios to assess the impacts of varying degrees of climate change, and
the ability of conservation actions to compensate for such impacts on
caribou movement behaviors. We found that (1) climate change impacts
reduced movement potential, and that (2) the complete restoration of
secondary roads inside protected areas was able to fully offset this
reduction, suggesting that road restoration would be an effective
compensatory conservation action. By evaluating conservation actions via
landscape use simulated by an individual-based model, we were able to
identify compensatory conservation options for an endangered species
facing climate change.