Qiyao Han (China)
Nanjing Agricultural University
School of Horticulture
Dr Qiyao Han is an Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture at Nanjing Agricultural University. She worked at Queen’s University Belfast as a research fellow from 2019 to 2021. She holds a doctoral degree in architecture and a master’s degree in landscape architecture. Her PhD project developed an approach to visualise the process of forest migration under climate change and explored the potential of large-scale urban afforestation to promote the ecological process. Qiyao’s research interests lie in nature-based solutions for climate adaptation and mitigation, multi-scale urban resilience to climate change, ecosystem services and benefits delivered by green infrastructure, afforestation and reforestation for carbon neutral cities, and biodiversity conservation in cities. Her research intends to explore the relationship between nature and urbanisation, the role that nature could play in urban environments, and the ways to insert nature into the urban matrix. Her study often uses mapping-based approaches to understand the complexities of urban systems and a research-by-design methodology to tackle wicked problems related to climate change. Her work has been published in the journals Landscape and Urban Planning, npj Urban Sustainability, and Forests.

Presenter of 1 Presentation

 Conference Calendar

MAPPING THE CLIMATE CONNECTIVITY OF FORESTS AROUND EUROPE

Session Name
0570 - Pecha Kuchas - Biodiversity 02: Green infrastructure and urban forestry (ID 78)
Session Type
Pecha Kuchas
Date
02/24/2022
Session Time
02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Room

Hall A

Presenter
Lecture Time
02:30 PM - 02:35 PM

Abstract

Abstract Body

Protected areas (PAs) are essential tools to conserve the biodiversity of ecosystems. However, anthropogenic climate change might affect the effectiveness of current PAs by causing large shifts in species distributions. By the end of this century, more than half of the plant species in Europe are projected to lose climatic suitability in existing conservation areas. This has led to a concern that whether species within current PAs are able to reach suitable climate conditions in the future.

Maintaining and improving the climate connectivity of protected areas are important to ensure the long-term survival and persistence of species. Here, we assessed the climate connectivity of the forest areas in European protected areas to their future climate analogues. Climate connectivity is defined as the extent to which the spatial configuration of a landscape allows species to track suitable climate conditions. Methods to assess climate connectivity have been proposed in recent studies to identify priority areas for connectivity conservation under climate change, based on the identification of either the closest climate analogues in the future or the coolest reachable habitat along temperature gradients. However, most of them do not fully consider the influence of species dispersal ability on climate connectivity .

Here, we integrated the factor of dispersal distance into the assessment of climate connectivity to quantify the climate connectivity of forests and highlighted sites of particular importance for range shifts where additional conservation attention is needed. We found that, about 50% of protected forest areas are successfully connected to their future climate analogues for the movement of species with small dispersal distances (2km and 10km), followed by 31% for medium-mobility (30km) and 10% for high-mobility species. On average, species with small dispersal distance and habitat requirement have a better chance to reach future habitats as climate warms, but their dispersal probability is more sensitive to climate change. If the climate changes more rapidly, more forest areas will lose their climate connectivity for low-mobility species.

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