Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, North Ryde, Macquarie Park, NSW 2019, Australia.
Department Animal Biology and Conservation Science, University of Ghana, Legon-Accra, Ghana.
Sci Rep. 2017 Oct 11;7(1):12979. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-13245-y.
Climate change vulnerability assessment (CCVA) has become a mainstay conservation decision support tool. CCVAs are recommended to incorporate three elements of vulnerability - exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity - yet, lack of data frequently leads to the latter being excluded. Further, weighted or unweighted scoring schemes, based on expert opinion, may be applied. Comparisons of these approaches are rare. In a CCVA for 17 Australian lizard species, we show that membership within three vulnerability categories (low, medium and high) generally remained similar regardless of the framework or scoring scheme. There was one exception however, where, under the warm/dry scenario for 2070, including adaptive capacity lead to five fewer species being classified as highly vulnerable. Two species, Eulamprus leuraensis and E. kosciuskoi, were consistently ranked the most vulnerable, primarily due to projected losses in climatically suitable habitat, narrow thermal tolerance and specialist habitat requirements. Our findings provide relevant information for prioritizing target species for conservation and choosing appropriate conservation actions. We conclude that for the species included in this study, the framework and scoring scheme used had little impact on the identification of the most vulnerable species. We caution, however, that this outcome may not apply to other taxa or regions.
气候变化脆弱性评估（CCVA）已成为保护决策的主要支持工具。CCVA 建议纳入脆弱性的三个要素——暴露度、敏感度和适应能力，但数据的缺乏往往导致后两个要素被排除在外。此外，还可以应用基于专家意见的加权或非加权评分方案。这些方法的比较很少见。在对 17 种澳大利亚蜥蜴物种进行的 CCVA 中，我们表明，无论使用哪种框架或评分方案，这三个脆弱性类别（低、中、高）的成员通常保持相似。但有一个例外，在 2070 年温暖/干燥的情景下，纳入适应能力后，被归类为高度脆弱的物种减少了 5 种。两种蜥蜴，即 Eulamprus leuraensis 和 E. kosciuskoi，由于预计其气候适宜栖息地减少、狭窄的热耐受范围和对特殊栖息地的需求，一直被列为最脆弱的物种。我们的研究结果为保护目标物种的优先级和选择适当的保护措施提供了相关信息。我们得出的结论是，对于本研究中包含的物种，使用的框架和评分方案对识别最脆弱的物种几乎没有影响。然而，我们警告说，这一结果可能不适用于其他分类群或地区。
