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Concept
Assisted migration
Summary
Assisted migration is "the intentional establishment of populations or meta-populations beyond the boundary of a species' historic range for the purpose of tracking suitable habitats through a period of changing climate...." It is therefore a nature conservation tactic by which plants or animals are intentionally moved to geographic locations better suited to their present or future habitat needs and climate tolerances — and to which they are unable to migrate or disperse on their own.
In conservation biology, the term first appeared in publications in 2004. It signified a type of species translocation intended to reduce biodiversity losses owing to climate change. In the context of endangered species management, assisted colonization (2007) and managed relocation (2009) were soon offered as synonyms — the latter in a paper entailing 22 coauthors.
In forestry science and management, assisted migration is discussed in its own journals and from perspectives different from those of conservation biologists. This is, in part, because paleoecologists had already concluded that there were significant lags in northward movement of even the dominant canopy trees in North America during the thousands of years since the final glacial retreat. In the 1990s, forestry researchers had begun applying climate change projections to their own tree species distribution modelling efforts, and some results on the probable distances of future range shifts prompted attention. As well, translocation terminology was not controversial among forestry researchers because migration was the standard term used in paleoecology for natural movements of tree species recorded in the geological record. Another key difference between forestry practices and conservation biology is that the former, necessarily, was guided by "seed transfer guidelines" whenever a timber or pulp harvest was followed up by reforestation plantings. The provincial government of British Columbia in Canada was the first to update their guidelines with, what they call, "climate-based seed transfer.
Official source
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