Hydrologic refugia,plants, and climate change

Climate, physical landscapes, and biota interact to generate heterogeneous hydrologic conditions in space and over time, which are reflected in spatial patterns of species distributions. As these species distributions respond to rapid climate change, microrefugia may support local species persistence in the face of deteriorating climatic suitability. Recent focus on temperature as a determinant of microrefugia insufficiently accounts for the importance of hydrologic processes and changing water availability with changing climate. Where water scarcity is a major limitation now or under future climates, hydrologic microrefugia are likely to prove essential for species persistence, particularly for sessile species and plants. Zones of high relative water availability – mesic microenvironments – are generated by a wide array of hydrologic processes, and may be loosely coupled to climatic processes and therefore buffered from climate change. Here, we review the mechanisms that generate mesic microenvironments and their likely robustness in the face of climate change. We argue that mesic microenvironments will act as species‐specific refugia only if the nature and space/time variability in water availability are compatible with the ecological requirements of a target species. We illustrate this argument with case studies drawn from California oak woodland ecosystems. We posit that identification of hydrologic refugia could form a cornerstone of climate‐cognizant conservation strategies, but that this would require improved understanding of climate change effects on key hydrologic processes, including frequently cryptic processes such as groundwater flow.     

Potential warm-stage microrefugia for alpine plants: Feedback between geomorphological and biological processes

During interglacial stages, microrefugia are sites that support locally favorable climates within larger areas with unfavorable warmer climates. Despite recent theoretical representations of microrefugia, an appropriate ecological characterization is still lacking, mostly for warm periods. Across mountain/alpine areas, cold-adapted plant species could adopt different strategies to manage the effects of climate warming: (A) migration toward higher elevations and summits; (B) in situ resilience of communities and species populations within microrefugia; and C) adaptation and evolution by genetic differentiation. This review aims to distinguish and characterize from an ecological perspective glacial, nival, periglacial and composite landforms and deposits that may function as potential microrefugia during interglacial warm periods.We conducted a literature screening related to the geomorphological processes and landforms associated with vegetation and plant communities in alpine/mountain environments of Europe. They include glacial deposits rock glaciers, debris-covered glaciers, composite cones and channels. In Alpine regions, geomorphologic niches that constantly maintain cold-air pooling and temperature inversions are the main candidates for microrefugia. Within such microrefugia, microhabitat diversity modulates the responses of plants to disturbances caused by geomorphologic processes and supports their aptitude for surviving under extreme conditions on unstable surfaces in isolated patches. Currently, European marginal mountain chains may be considered as examples of macrorefugia where relict boreo-alpine species persist within peculiar geomorphological niches that act as microrefugia.This review contributes to identifying potential warm-stage microrefugia areas across alpine and mountain regions and determining certain landforms that play or may play such role under global-change scenarios. The occurrence of warm-stage microrefugia within these locations may be of great importance for the modeling of future distributions of species and assessing the risk of extinction for alpine species. Microrefugia may have important implications in micro-evolutionary processes that occur across alternating climatic phases.     

Improving the interpretability of climate landscape metrics: An ecological risk analysis of Japan's Marine Protected Areas

Conservation efforts strive to protect significant swaths of terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems from a range of threats. As climate change becomes an increasing concern, these efforts must take into account how resilient‐protected spaces will be in the face of future drivers of change such as warming temperatures. Climate landscape metrics, which signal the spatial magnitude and direction of climate change, support a convenient initial assessment of potential threats to and opportunities within ecosystems to inform conservation and policy efforts where biological data are not available. However, inference of risk from purely physical climatic changes is difficult unless set in a meaningful ecological context. Here, we aim to establish this context using historical climatic variability, as a proxy for local adaptation by resident biota, to identify areas where current local climate conditions will remain extant and future regional climate analogues will emerge. This information is then related to the processes governing species’ climate‐driven range edge dynamics, differentiating changes in local climate conditions as promoters of species range contractions from those in neighbouring locations facilitating range expansions. We applied this approach to assess the future climatic stability and connectivity of Japanese waters and its network of marine protected areas (MPAs). We find 88% of Japanese waters transitioning to climates outside their historical variability bounds by 2035, resulting in large reductions in the amount of available climatic space potentially promoting widespread range contractions and expansions. Areas of high connectivity, where shifting climates converge, are present along sections of the coast facilitated by the strong latitudinal gradient of the Japanese archipelago and its ocean current system. While these areas overlap significantly with areas currently under significant anthropogenic pressures, they also include much of the MPA network that may provide stepping‐stone protection for species that must shift their distribution because of climate change.     

Bridging the gap between microclimate and microrefugia: A bottom-up approach reveals strong climatic and biological offsets

In the context of global warming, a clear understanding of microrefugia—microsites enabling the survival of species populations outside their main range limits—is crucial. Several studies have identified forcing factors that are thought to favor the existence of microrefugia. However, there is a lack of evidence to conclude whether, and to what extent, the climate encountered within existing microrefugia differs from the surrounding climate. To investigate this, we adopt a “bottom-up” approach, linking marginal disconnected populations to microclimate. We used the southernmost disconnected and abyssal populations of the circumboreal herbaceous plant Oxalis acetosella in Southern France to study whether populations in sites matching the definition of “microrefugia” occur in particularly favorable climatic conditions compared to neighboring control plots located at distances of between 50 to 100 m. Temperatures were recorded in putative microrefugia and in neighboring plots for approximately 2 years to quantify their thermal offsets. Vascular plant inventories were carried out to test whether plant communities also reflect microclimatic offsets. We found that current microclimatic dynamics are genuinely at stake in microrefugia. Microrefugia climates are systematically colder compared to those found in neighboring control plots. This pattern was more noticeable during the summer months. Abyssal populations showed stronger offsets compared to neighboring plots than the putative microrefugia occurring at higher altitudes. Plant communities demonstrate this strong spatial climatic variability, even at such a microscale approach, as species compositions systematically differed between the two plots, with species more adapted to colder and moister conditions in microrefugia compared to the surrounding area.     

Fine‐scale climate change: modelling spatial variation in biologically meaningful rates of warming

The existence of fine‐grain climate heterogeneity has prompted suggestions that species may be able to survive future climate change in pockets of suitable microclimate, termed ‘microrefugia’. However, evidence for microrefugia is hindered by lack of understanding of how rates of warming vary across a landscape. Here, we present a model that is applied to provide fine‐grained, multidecadal estimates of temperature change based on the underlying physical processes that influence microclimate. Weather station and remotely derived environmental data were used to construct physical variables that capture the effects of terrain, sea surface temperatures, altitude and surface albedo on local temperatures, which were then calibrated statistically to derive gridded estimates of temperature. We apply the model to the Lizard Peninsula, United Kingdom, to provide accurate (mean error = 1.21 °C; RMS error = 1.63 °C) hourly estimates of temperature at a resolution of 100 m for the period 1977–2014. We show that rates of warming vary across a landscape primarily due to long‐term trends in weather conditions. Total warming varied from 0.87 to 1.16 °C, with the slowest rates of warming evident on north‐east‐facing slopes. This variation contributed to substantial spatial heterogeneity in trends in bioclimatic variables: for example, the change in the length of the frost‐free season varied from +11 to ?54 days and the increase in annual growing degree‐days from 51 to 267 °C days. Spatial variation in warming was caused primarily by a decrease in daytime cloud cover with a resulting increase in received solar radiation, and secondarily by a decrease in the strength of westerly winds, which has amplified the effects on temperature of solar radiation on west‐facing slopes. We emphasize the importance of multidecadal trends in weather conditions in determining spatial variation in rates of warming, suggesting that locations experiencing least warming may not remain consistent under future climate change.     

Why decadal to century timescale palaeoclimate data are needed to explain present‐day patterns of biological diversity and change

The current distribution of species, environmental conditions and their interactions represent only one snapshot of a planet that is continuously changing, in part due to human influences. To distinguish human impacts from natural factors, the magnitude and pace of climate shifts, since the Last Glacial Maximum, are often used to determine whether patterns of diversity today are artefacts of past climate change. In the absence of high‐temporal resolution palaeoclimate reconstructions, this is generally done by assuming that past climate change occurred at a linear pace between widely spaced (usually, ≥1,000 years) climate snapshots. We show here that this is a flawed assumption because regional climates have changed significantly across decades and centuries during glacial–interglacial cycles, likely causing rapid regional replacement of biota. We demonstrate how recent atmosphere‐ocean general circulation model (AOGCM) simulations of the climate of the past 21,000 years can provide credible estimates of the details of climate change on decadal to centennial timescales, showing that these details differ radically from what might be inferred from longer timescale information. High‐temporal resolution information can provide more meaningful estimates of the magnitude and pace of climate shifts, the location and timing of drivers of physiological stress, and the extent of novel climates. They also produce new opportunities to directly investigate whether short‐term climate variability is more important in shaping biodiversity patterns rather than gradual changes in long‐term climatic means. Together, these more accurate measures of past climate instability are likely to bring about a better understanding of the role of palaeoclimatic change and variability in shaping current macroecological patterns in many regions of the world.     

Scale‐dependent complementarity of climatic velocity and environmental diversity for identifying priority areas for conservation under climate change

As most regions of the earth transition to altered climatic conditions, new methods are needed to identify refugia and other areas whose conservation would facilitate persistence of biodiversity under climate change. We compared several common approaches to conservation planning focused on climate resilience over a broad range of ecological settings across North America and evaluated how commonalities in the priority areas identified by different methods varied with regional context and spatial scale. Our results indicate that priority areas based on different environmental diversity metrics differed substantially from each other and from priorities based on spatiotemporal metrics such as climatic velocity. Refugia identified by diversity or velocity metrics were not strongly associated with the current protected area system, suggesting the need for additional conservation measures including protection of refugia. Despite the inherent uncertainties in predicting future climate, we found that variation among climatic velocities derived from different general circulation models and emissions pathways was less than the variation among the suite of environmental diversity metrics. To address uncertainty created by this variation, planners can combine priorities identified by alternative metrics at a single resolution and downweight areas of high variation between metrics. Alternately, coarse‐resolution velocity metrics can be combined with fine‐resolution diversity metrics in order to leverage the respective strengths of the two groups of metrics as tools for identification of potential macro‐ and microrefugia that in combination maximize both transient and long‐term resilience to climate change. Planners should compare and integrate approaches that span a range of model complexity and spatial scale to match the range of ecological and physical processes influencing persistence of biodiversity and identify a conservation network resilient to threats operating at multiple scales.     

A novel approach to quantify and locate potential microrefugia using topoclimate,climate stability,and isolation from the matrix

Ecologists are increasingly recognizing the conservation significance of microrefugia, but it is inherently difficult to locate these small patches with unusual climates, and hence they are also referred to as cryptic refugia. Here we introduce a new methodology to quantify and locate potential microrefugia using fine‐scale topoclimatic grids that capture extreme conditions, stable climates, and distinct differences from the surrounding matrix. We collected hourly temperature data from 150 sites in a large (200 km by 300 km) and diverse region of New South Wales, Australia, for a total of 671 days over 2 years. Sites spanned a range of habitats including coastal dune shrublands, eucalypt forests, exposed woodland ridges, sheltered rainforest gullies, upland swamps, and lowland pastures. Climate grids were interpolated using a regional regression approach based on elevation, distance to coast, canopy cover, latitude, cold‐air drainage, and topographical exposure to winds and radiation. We identified extreme temperatures on two separate climatic gradients: the 5th percentile of minimum temperatures and the 95th percentile of maximum temperatures. For each gradient, climatic stability was assessed on three different time scales (intra‐seasonal, intra‐annual and inter‐annual). Differences from the matrix were assessed using a moving window with a 5 km radius. We averaged the Z‐scores for these extreme, stable and isolated climates to identify potential locations of microrefugia. We found that our method successfully predicted the location of communities that were considered to occupy refugia, such as rainforests that have progressively contracted in distribution over the last 2.5 million years, and alpine grasslands that have contracted over the last 15 thousand years. However, the method was inherently sensitive to the gradient selected and other aspects of the modelling process. These uncertainties could be dealt with in a conservation planning context by repeating the methodology with various parameterizations and identifying areas that were consistently identified as microrefugia.     

Responses of foliage‐living spider assemblage composition and traits to a climatic gradient in Themeda grasslands

For speciose, but poorly known groups, such as terrestrial arthropods, functional traits present a potential avenue to assist in predicting responses to environmental change. Species turnover is common along environmental gradients, but it is unclear how this is reflected in species traits. Community‐level change in arthropod traits, other than body size, has rarely been explored across spatial scales comparable to those examined here. We hypothesized that the composition and morphological traits of spider assemblages would differ across a gradient of climate and habitat structure. We examined foliage‐living spider assemblages associated with Themeda triandra grasslands along a 900 km climatic gradient in south‐eastern Australia. We used sweep‐netting to collect T. triandra‐associated spiders and counted juveniles and identified adults. We also measured morphological traits of adult spiders and noted their hunting mode. Associations with measures of habitat structure were less consistent than relationships with climate. Both juvenile and adult spiders were more abundant in warmer sites, although species richness was not affected by temperature. We found distinct turnover in species composition along the climatic gradient, with hunting spiders, particularly crab spiders (Thomisidae), making up a greater proportion of assemblages in warmer climates. A range of traits of spiders correlated with the climatic gradient. For example, larger spider species and species that were active hunters were more common in warmer climates. Changes in morphological traits across species, rather than within species drove the morphology‐climate relationship. Strong climate‐trait correlations suggest that it may be possible to predict changes in functional traits of assemblages in response to anthropogenic disturbances such as climate change.     

Potential relocation of climatic environments suggests high rates of climate displacement within the North American protection network

Ongoing climate change may undermine the effectiveness of protected area networks in preserving the set of biotic components and ecological processes they harbor, thereby jeopardizing their conservation capacity into the future. Metrics of climate change, particularly rates and spatial patterns of climatic alteration, can help assess potential threats. Here, we perform a continent‐wide climate change vulnerability assessment whereby we compare the baseline climate of the protected area network in North America (Canada, United States, México—NAM) to the projected end‐of‐century climate (2071–2100). We estimated the projected pace at which climatic conditions may redistribute across NAM (i.e., climate velocity), and identified future nearest climate analogs to quantify patterns of climate relocation within, among, and outside protected areas. Also, we interpret climatic relocation patterns in terms of associated land‐cover types. Our analysis suggests that the conservation capacity of the NAM protection network is likely to be severely compromised by a changing climate. The majority of protected areas (~80%) might be exposed to high rates of climate displacement that could promote important shifts in species abundance or distribution. A small fraction of protected areas (<10%) could be critical for future conservation plans, as they will host climates that represent analogs of conditions currently characterizing almost a fifth of the protected areas across NAM. However, the majority of nearest climatic analogs for protected areas are in nonprotected locations. Therefore, unprotected landscapes could pose additional threats, beyond climate forcing itself, as sensitive biota may have to migrate farther than what is prescribed by the climate velocity to reach a protected area destination. To mitigate future threats to the conservation capacity of the NAM protected area network, conservation plans will need to capitalize on opportunities provided by the existing availability of natural land‐cover types outside the current network of NAM protected areas.     

Evolution of climatic niche specialization: a phylogenetic analysis in amphibians

The evolution of climatic niche specialization has important implications for many topics in ecology, evolution and conservation. The climatic niche reflects the set of temperature and precipitation conditions where a species can occur. Thus, specialization to a limited set of climatic conditions can be important for understanding patterns of biogeography, species richness, community structure, allopatric speciation, spread of invasive species and responses to climate change. Nevertheless, the factors that determine climatic niche width (level of specialization) remain poorly explored. Here, we test whether species that occur in more extreme climates are more highly specialized for those conditions, and whether there are trade-offs between niche widths on different climatic niche axes (e.g. do species that tolerate a broad range of temperatures tolerate only a limited range of precipitation regimes?). We test these hypotheses in amphibians, using phylogenetic comparative methods and global-scale datasets, including 2712 species with both climatic and phylogenetic data. Our results do not support either hypothesis. Rather than finding narrower niches in more extreme environments, niches tend to be narrower on one end of a climatic gradient but wider on the other. We also find that temperature and precipitation niche breadths are positively related, rather than showing trade-offs. Finally, our results suggest that most amphibian species occur in relatively warm and dry environments and have relatively narrow climatic niche widths on both of these axes. Thus, they may be especially imperilled by anthropogenic climate change.     

Evolutionary refugia and ecological refuges: key concepts for conserving Australian arid zone freshwater biodiversity under climate change

Refugia have been suggested as priority sites for conservation under climate change because of their ability to facilitate survival of biota under adverse conditions. Here, we review the likely role of refugial habitats in conserving freshwater biota in arid Australian aquatic systems where the major long‐term climatic influence has been aridification. We introduce a conceptual model that characterizes evolutionary refugia and ecological refuges based on our review of the attributes of aquatic habitats and freshwater taxa (fishes and aquatic invertebrates) in arid Australia. We also identify methods of recognizing likely future refugia and approaches to assessing the vulnerability of arid‐adapted freshwater biota to a warming and drying climate. Evolutionary refugia in arid areas are characterized as permanent, groundwater‐dependent habitats (subterranean aquifers and springs) supporting vicariant relicts and short‐range endemics. Ecological refuges can vary across space and time, depending on the dispersal abilities of aquatic taxa and the geographical proximity and hydrological connectivity of aquatic habitats. The most important are the perennial waterbodies (both groundwater and surface water fed) that support obligate aquatic organisms. These species will persist where suitable habitats are available and dispersal pathways are maintained. For very mobile species (invertebrates with an aerial dispersal phase) evolutionary refugia may also act as ecological refuges. Evolutionary refugia are likely future refugia because their water source (groundwater) is decoupled from local precipitation. However, their biota is extremely vulnerable to changes in local conditions because population extinction risks cannot be abated by the dispersal of individuals from other sites. Conservation planning must incorporate a high level of protection for aquifers that support refugial sites. Ecological refuges are vulnerable to changes in regional climate because they have little thermal or hydrological buffering. Accordingly, conservation planning must focus on maintaining meta‐population processes, especially through dynamic connectivity between aquatic habitats at a landscape scale.     

Predicted effects of climate factors on mountain species are not uniform over different spatial scales

The selection of relevant factors and appropriate spatial scale(s) is fundamental when modelling species response to climate change. We evaluated whether the effects of climate factors on species distribution/occurrence are consistently modelled over different spatial scales in birds, and used a two‐scale approach to identify species–climate correlations unlikely to represent causal effects. We used passerine birds inhabiting mountain grassland in the Apennines (Italy) as a model. We surveyed four grassland species at 400 sampling points, and built habitat selection models (territory scale) and distribution models (seven algorithms, landscape scale). We compared the effect of climatic predictors on occurrence/distribution highlighted by models over the two spatial scales, and with the effects supposed a priori based on the climatic niche of each species. Models at the territory level included at least one climatic predictor for three species; the observed effect of climatic predictors was seldom consistent with supposed effects. At the broadest scale, distribution models for all species included climatic predictors, with varying consistence with supposed effects and findings at the finer scale. Despite the importance of climate for species distribution, occurrence could be more directly related to other factors, with important implications for understanding/predicting the impacts of climate/environmental changes. Our approach revealed key variables for grassland birds, and highlighted the scale‐dependent perceived importance of climate. At the local scale, climate effects were weak or hard to interpret. We found a general lack of consistence between supposed and observed effects at the territory level, and between landscape and territory models. Our results show the importance of predicting the potential effect of climatic factors prior to the analyses, carefully selecting ecologically meaningful variables and scales, and evaluating the nature and scale of climate–species links. We call for caution when predicting under future climates, especially when mechanistic effects and consistency across scales are lacking.     

Effects of large-scale Amazon forest degradation on climate and air quality through fluxes of carbon dioxide, water, energy, mineral dust and isoprene

Loss of large areas of Amazonian forest, through either direct human impact or climate change, could exert a number of influences on the regional and global climates. In the Met Office Hadley Centre coupled climate-carbon cycle model, a severe drying of this region initiates forest loss that exerts a number of feedbacks on global and regional climates, which magnify the drying and the forest degradation. This paper provides an overview of the multiple feedback process in the Hadley Centre model and discusses the implications of the results for the case of direct human-induced deforestation. It also examines additional potential effects of forest loss through changes in the emissions of mineral dust and biogenic volatile organic compounds. The implications of ecosystem-climate feedbacks for climate change mitigation and adaptation policies are also discussed.     

A closer look at novel climates: new methods and insights at continental to landscape scales

Novel climates – emerging conditions with no analog in the observational record – are an open problem in ecological modeling. Detecting extrapolation into novel conditions is a critical step in evaluating bioclimatic projections of how species and ecosystems will respond to climate change. However, biologically informed novelty detection methods remain elusive for many modeling algorithms. To assist with bioclimatic model design and evaluation, we present a first‐approximation assessment of general novelty based on a simple and consistent characterization of climate. We build on the seminal global analysis of Williams et al. (2007 PNAS, 104, 5738) by assessing of end‐of‐21st‐century novelty for North America at high spatial resolution and by refining their standardized Euclidean distance into an intuitive Mahalanobian metric called sigma dissimilarity. Like this previous study, we found extensive novelty in end‐of‐21st‐century projections for the warm southern margin of the continent as well as the western Arctic. In addition, we detected localized novelty in lower topographic positions at all latitudes: By the end of the 21st century, novel climates are projected to emerge at low elevations in 80% and 99% of ecoregions in the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 emissions scenarios, respectively. Novel climates are limited to 7% of the continent's area in RCP4.5, but are much more extensive in RCP8.5 (40% of area). These three risk factors for novel climates – regional susceptibility, topographic position, and the magnitude of projected climate change – represent a priori evaluation criteria for the credibility of bioclimatic projections. Our findings indicate that novel climates can emerge in any landscape. Interpreting climatic novelty in the context of nonlinear biological responses to climate is an important challenge for future research.     

Pleistocene climatic changes drive diversification across a tropical savanna

Spatial responses of species to past climate change depend on both intrinsic traits (climatic niche breadth, dispersal rates) and the scale of climatic fluctuations across the landscape. New capabilities in generating and analysing population genomic data, along with spatial modelling, have unleashed our capacity to infer how past climate changes have shaped populations, and by extension, complex communities. Combining these approaches, we uncover lineage diversity across four codistributed lizards from the Australian Monsoonal Tropics and explore how varying climatic tolerances interact with regional climate history to generate common vs. disparate responses to late Pleistocene change. We find more divergent spatial structuring and temporal demographic responses in the drier Kimberley region compared to the more mesic and consistently suitable Top End. We hypothesize that, in general, the effects of species’ traits on sensitivity to climate fluctuation will be more evident in climatically marginal regions. If true, this points to the need in climatically marginal areas to craft more species‐(or trait)‐specific strategies for persistence under future climate change.     

Regional variation in timing,duration, and production of flowers by allergenic ragweed

Plant reproduction has broad implications for ecology and society (e.g., production of allergenic pollen), and a number of processes that affect flowering are affected by climate. In this study, we tested for variation in traits related to pollen production by the allergenic plant, common ragweed, across a climate gradient in Massachusetts. We tested whether traits that are easily-measured in the field could be used to predict differences in spike length, a known proxy for allergenic pollen production, and the timing and duration of flowering. We also tested whether flowering time and allometric estimates of spike length varied across the climate gradient, to better understand climate effects on future pollen production. We found that height predicts inflorescence length, but the slope of the relationship between the two traits is steeper in cooler climates, suggesting ragweed growing in cool climates produces more pollen per unit of vegetative height than ragweed in warm climates. Cool climates were also associated with larger and higher numbers of flowers and earlier and longer periods of flowering. Thus, we provide improved estimates of local pollen exposure by establishing variation in timing and output of flowering across a regional climate gradient, and at a spatial scale that may be useful for developing management strategies for allergenic plants.     

Current and future habitat availability for Thick‐billed and Maroon‐fronted parrots in northern Mexican forests

Thick‐billed Parrots (Rhynchopsitta pachyrhyncha) and Maroon‐fronted Parrots (Rhynchopsitta terrisi) are the only parrots in Mexico found in high‐elevation coniferous forests. Both species are critically endangered due to logging, and climate change is expected to further reduce their available habitat. Our objectives were to assess the present and future availability of a suitable habitat for these parrots using ecological niche models. Future climatic scenarios were estimated by overlaying the present distributions of these parrots on maps of projected biome distributions generated using a North American vegetation model. Our climatic scenarios revealed that the distribution of key habitats for both parrots will likely be affected as the climate becomes more suitable for xeric biomes. The climate associated with coniferous forests in the current range of Maroon‐fronted Parrots is predicted to disappear by 2090, and the climate associated with the key coniferous habitats of Thick‐billed Parrots may contract. However, our results also indicate that suitable climatic conditions will prevail for the high‐elevation coniferous biomes where Thick‐billed Parrots nest. The degree to which both species of parrots will be able to adapt to the new scenarios is uncertain. Some of their life history traits may allow them to respond with a combination of adaptive and spatial responses to climatic change and, in addition, suitable climatic conditions will prevail in some portions of their ranges. Actions needed to ensure the conservation of these parrots include strict control of logging and integration of rapid response teams for fire management within the potential foraging ranges of nesting pairs. A landscape with a greater proportion of restored forests would also aid in the recovery of current populations of Thick‐billed and Maroon‐fronted parrots and facilitate their responses to climate change.