Climate velocity can inform conservation in a warming world

Highlights Climate velocity is a simple metric that describes the speed and direction of climate movement at any point in space. Climate velocity is providing information about climate change that is relevant for conservation, including the study of protected areas, novel and/or disappearing climates, rates of endemism, and range shifts. To better inform conservation, climate velocity can be tailored to be more biologically meaningful through the addition of dispersal capabilities, physiological tolerance, and potential routes of movements of species. There is untapped potential for using climate velocity and climate-velocity trajectories in informing the design of protected areas and their networks, conserving ocean biodiversity in 3D, and in informing conservation actions. To stimulate future research using climate velocity, we introduce the R package vocc