Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment of Rare Plants

Project Overview

Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment of Rare Plants in California is a CDFW project that began in 2011 to provide information or rare plant vulnerability to climate change. Project funding and oversight came from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Landscape Conservation Cooperative (CA LCC).

The purpose of this project was to:

• Develop a climate change vulnerability assessment methodology,
• As a pilot study, assess roughly 10% of California’s rare plant species,
• Evaluate the Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI) of NatureServe as a tool for ranking rare plant species with regards to climate change vulnerability,
• Use species distribution modeling to assess future range change under various climate change scenarios for rare plants, and
• Evaluate how vulnerability assessments can be used to set goals, determine management priorities, and inform decisions about appropriate adaptation strategies

Reports and Further Information

• Project Report: detailed summary of the process and datasets developed (PDF)
• CCVI documents for species surveyed (downloadable Excel documents)
• Profiles of climate change sensitivities for species surveyed (downloadable Word documents)

Related Efforts

Several other organizations have begun vulnerability assessment for plants, including Patti Vitt and Shannon Still of the Chicago Botanic Garden (funded by BLM), Mark Schwartz and Steele of UC Davis (funded by USFS), and Sam Veloz of Point Reyes Bird Observatory and Healey Hamilton of the Cal Academy of Sciences, and Frank Davis of UC Santa Barbara (funded by NSF).

Contact

Melanie Gogol-Prokurat
Biogeographic Data Branch
(916) 324-9265
Melanie.Gogol-Prokurat@wildlife.ca.gov