Tiny niches and translocations: the challenge of identifying suitable recipient sites for small and immobile species

Assisted colonisation, one form of species translocation, has been proposed as a tool for helping species to track suitable conditions in a changing climate. There are considerable practical challenges associated with it, including predicting where to place translocated individuals. This problem may be particularly big for small and immobile species, where small-scale micro-environmental conditions de-couple them from environmental conditions as projected in large-scale climate models.
To investigate this problem we developed a survey-based model to predict the occurrence of our target species, the fruticose terricolous arctic-alpine lichen, Flavocetraria nivalis, within the Cairngorm Mountains.
We then undertook an experimental translocation of this species. A second model, using variables that were significant in the survey-based model, was only fair at predicting the initial pattern of survival at the recipient site.
However, model fit of the translocation survival model improved ...