Conservation planners use ‘climate change adaptation’ modeling is to identify areas that connect current and potential future habitat. There are two major approaches, one based on physical habitat types and one based on species-level habitat needs. The first method does not consider habitat from a species-specific perspective, but rather identifies areas based on their physical (topography, geology, climate) characteristics. One can seek to preserve representative examples of all such physical types, an approach termed the ‘Enduring Features’ strategy. Or one can identify areas where there are gradients or mosaics of physical types in close proximity, which might allow species to find refuge as climate shifts. Or one can model how physical or vegetation community types will shift under changing climates and prioritize areas that provide a corridor of similar physical habitat or community type through time. A new paper in Conservation Biology by Beier and Brost describes this approach. A second approach builds on the climatic niche models for individual species described above. How different are the areas identified by species-based and physical habitat type-based methods? There has not yet been a detailed comparison of the two approaches, although several studies have found that physical habitat types, while a useful ‘shortcut’ in some situations, generally are not good representatives for biodiversity at the species level. The Beier and Brost paper acknowledges that conservation of ‘enduring features’ should complement rather than replace species-level planning.