Ecological risk assessment of managed relocation as a climate change adaptation strategy

Karasov-Olson, Aviv; Schwartz, Mark; Olden, Julian; Skikne, Sarah; Hellman, Jessica; Allen, Sarah; Brigham, Christy; Buttke, Danielle; Lawrence, David; Miller-Rushing, Abraham; Morisette, Jeffrey; Schuurman, Gregor; Trammell, Melissa; Hawkins-Hoffma, Cat

doi:10.36967/nrr-2284919

Changing climate and introduced species are placing an increasing number of species at risk of extinction. Increasing extinction risk is increasing calls to protect species by relocating, or translocating, them to locations with more favorable biotic or climatic conditions. Managed relocation, or assisted migration, of species entails risks to both the conservation target organisms being moved as well as the recipient ecosystems into which they are moved. Recognizing this risk, calls have been made for practitioners interested in considering a managed relocation project to engage in a serious risk assessment prior to advancing a project. We engaged a team of researchers and resource managers to create risk assessment protocols that could be used by natural resource managers within U.S. National Parks, or elsewhere, to help inform a decision of whether the risks involved in managed relocation are warranted. These protocols facilitate evaluation of the ecological risk of species managed relocation as part of planning and decision making. This is not a policy document. It neither introduces new policy, nor serves to interpret or resolve current policies regarding managed relocation (or assisted migration) as a natural resource management strategy. We assembled a team of five university researchers and ten federal resource management researchers and staff to develop a practical management-oriented risk assessment strategy. We jointly agreed to a set of principles to guide this managed relocation risk assessment strategy. This protocol and accompanying spreadsheet would be used to help a decision-maker structure a decision process but would not strive to provide a formulaic decision output. Identifying, evaluating, and managing risk is a subjective decision that is the responsibility of the decision authority. We began by defining the scope of this work to include moving populations or species for the purpose of conserving the target populations or species that are threatened by climate or invasive species. We also included species movements for the purpose of retaining some critical ecosystem function. We did not include management actions such as planned ecosystem re-alignment for climate change or other kinds of translocations associated with ecosystem manipulation (e.g., habitat restoration), although these protocols may be useful for some of those management actions with minor modification. We adopted the premise that risk decisions are inherently subjective and that different aspects of risk (e.g., the risk of a moved species introducing a novel pathogen to an ecosystem, the risk of unwanted evolution in the moved species) are non-additive. Hence, our strategy is designed to encourage managers to think broadly and comprehensively about risk in order to make the best possible decision given alternate opposing risks (i.e., the risk of extinction versus the risk of causing unintended harm to other species and ecosystems in the process of trying to save a species). We identified six major areas of risk, with a total of seventeen sub-categories. These are...

Ecological risk assessment of managed relocation as a climate change adaptation strategy

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