Understanding the potential stress of climate change on vegetation can help guide conservation and land management decisions. Climatic stress varies across the distribution of each vegetation type. Vegetation refugia are areas where climatic stress is expected to remain within the tolerance level of a given vegetation type-areas where the vegetation and the species that depend on these habitats might find refuge in the face of climate change. We discuss a vegetation vulnerability and refugia dataset that was developed for California, how this data has been applied to the habitat maps of 522 terrestrial vertebrate species, and other conservation applications of the data.
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