Climate Networks among Wildlife Refuges
Network analysis investigates structures by identifying networks among
component individuals (Otte and Rousseau 2002). Each individual is
called a node and links are the relations between nodes (Cumming et al.
2010). Here, refuges are the nodes and we linked refuges using the
relationships of climate space of each refuge. We used arrows to
represent the directions of links. If an initial refuge node’s current
climate space is found in other refuge nodes, those nodes are final
nodes and the arrowheads point to the final nodes. The density of
vectors is an indicator of the connectedness in the network (Otte and
Rousseau 2002). We calculated the levels of connections for each refuge
unit and the number of nodes from which climate departs or arrives can
be found under future projections.
After mapping the temporal climate networks among refuges for each
climate projection, we asked how many distinct types of climate
connections could be identified. For the future-climate connections
among refuges, we report on 2070-2099 in the main text, and see Table S2
for other future periods results.