The notion of conserving communities and ecosystems as they presently exist may soon be obsolete. Projec-tions of human-induced climate changes and evidence of past rapid climate shifts indicate that patterns of biodi-versity may change over landscape scales over time frames as short as decades. New, dynamic conservation strategies are needed to accommodate the natural and human-induced changes in climate that present evidence suggests are inevitable. At the same time, future climate change must be constrained. If it is not, even expanded, dynamic conservation efforts will ultimately be overwhelmed.

The stakes are high. The political barometer of aver-age global temperature increase in 2100 masks the mag-nitude of possible effects on biodiversity in both time and space. Changes in temperature over continental ar-eas will be higher, possibly more than double the global average in some areas …