Energetic constraints reshape climate-tracking opportunities for large mammals across European protected-area networks

Study overview Protected areas (PAs) remain central to biodiversity conservation, but climate change is shifting temperature conditions beyond the boundaries of many protected sites. Their effectiveness therefore increasingly depends on both the time for which analogous climatic conditions remain available within a PA and the potential for species to move through surrounding landscapes. Our study develops a climate-informed connectivity framework for 10,908 terrestrial PAs across Europe. It integrates temperature-based climate velocity, protected-area climatic residence time, current habitat suitability, physical and anthropogenic barriers, and terrain-related energetic movement costs. Functional connectivity is evaluated for ten focal large-mammal taxa, summarized into two analytical archetypes: large ungulates (the herbivore archetype) and large carnivores (the carnivore archetype). The framework identifies where climatic persistence and movement potential coincide, where they are spatially mismatched, and where climate-tracking opportunities may be constrained by both rapid climatic turnover and low landscape permeability.