Conservation priorities in the Mediterranean Basin have become increasingly linked to areas of potential refugia,especially in mountain regions, having an inherent resilience to climate disturbances, providing safe havens where biota can be safeguarded for long.
With the present project (MED-REFUGIA) we intend to highlight the role played by Mediterranean mountains in preserving cold-adapted species during the Holocene climatic amelioration, current interglacial period, which have forced these species to migrate upwards, from lowland areas, searching for more climatically appropriate places where they may survive. This project also aims to propose the term interglacial refugia in the Mediterranean mountains for cold-adapted taxa, making use of long temporal (from Late Glacial Maximum to Recent Warming) datasets on the presence of these taxa in order to validate the proposed definition.
The study will focus on 5 conifer trees spread across Western Mediterranean mountains, Abies pinsapo Boiss., A. marocana Trabut, A. tazaotana Côzar ex Huguet del Villar, Cedrus atlantica (Endl.) Manetti ex Carriere and Pinus nigra Arnold. Employing primarily both existing fossil records and new sequences and surveys (last 21.000 years) from Morocco andSouthern Iberia, MED-REFUGIA will carry out a multidisciplinary integration of fossil records (pollen and macroremains), vegetation modelling and biogeographical and evolutionary studies.
With the aim of responding to the question “Are high mountain micro-refugia the key to mountain conifer forest sustainability and conservation under projected climate change?”, MED-REFUGIA will evaluate the migration capacity of Mediterranean mountain conifer species, their potential for in situ adaptation, ecosystem turnover over time, the tipping points that could lead them to extinction, the rate of change and, ultimately, define vulnerability indexes/thresholds.
With this multidisciplinary approach, we expect our assessment will enable the improvement of conservation policies for the long-term survival of these relict long-lived species and their genetic resources.