Severe Loss of Suitable Climatic Conditions for Marsupial Species in Brazil: Challenges and Opportunities for Conservation

Abstract

A wide range of evidences indicate climate change as one the greatest threats to biodiversity in the 21st century. The impacts of these changes, which may have already resulted in several recent species extinction, are species-specific and produce shifts in species phenology, ecological interactions, and geographical distributions. Here we used cutting-edge methods of species distribution models combining thousands of model projections to generate a complete and comprehensive ensemble of forecasts that shows the likely impacts of climate change in the distribution of all 55 marsupial species that occur in Brazil. Consensus projections forecasted range shifts that culminate with high species richness in the southeast of Brazil, both for the current time and for 2050. Most species had a significant range contraction and lost climate space. Turnover rates were relatively high, but vary across the country. We also mapped sites retaining climatic suitability. They can be found in all Brazilian biomes, especially in the pampas region, in the southern part of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, in the north of the Cerrado and Caatinga, and in the northwest of the Amazon. Our results provide a general overview on the likely effects of global climate change on the distribution of marsupials in the country as well as in the patterns of species richness and turnover found in regional marsupial assemblages.

Areas of climate stability of species ranges in the Brazilian Cerrado: disentangling uncertainties through time

“…A common approach to explore the location of climatically suitable areas in the future (Garcia et al 2012;Loyola et al 2012) involves the use of Ecological Niche Models (ENMs; also called Species Distribution Models -but see Araújo & Peterson (2012) and Peterson & Soberón (2012)). These individualistic responses of species' geographical range and from variation through time.…”

Projected impacts of climate change on protected birds and nature reserves in China

“…G i is the number of species gained in the cell i. L i is the number of species lost, and SR i is the current species richness found in the cell [75]. Species turnover rate can measure the dissimilarity between the current and future species composition [76], and often regarded as a good proxy of community structure in the assessment of potential impacts of climate change [77].…”

Labeling Ecological Niche Models

“…When predicting climate change effects on species distributions, commission errors lead to overestimation of range expansions whereas omission errors produce overestimates of range contractions. If one is employing such models to predict regions of climatic stability (Garcia et al 2012;Loyola et al 2012;Terribile et al 2012), and to guide conservation actions, both omission and commission errors are of particular interest, as these errors are likely to produce huge bias in the results of gap-analysis as well (Marini et al 2009). …”

“…It has been recently suggested that the use of ensemble of forecasts is preferred as oppose to model species distribution based on only one ENM (e.g. MaxEnt) (Loyola et al 2012). Ensembles of model projections keep only the consensus-projected areas, minimizing variation among all projections (Araújo & New 2007).…”