How to anticipate the future impacts of climate change on biodiversity ?

Context

• Importance of Mozambique’s Biodiversity due to mainly its large extent of remaining Miombo ecosystem (40% of the country extent)
• Mozambique Biodiversity is under major threats, due to land use changes (~220 000 ha of deforestation per year) and climate changes processes
• Lack of available data and knowledge regarding species occurrence and distribution at national scale
• New spatial modeling tools that combine biodiversity’s observations with environmental variables enable to provide rapid, large-scale, current and future biodiversity distribution patterns

Objectives

The final goal of this study is to support the identification of high priority areas for biodiversity conservation
• Test the speciesaltas R packages to develop species distributions maps over Mozambique
• Produce scenarios of biodiversity evolution under climate change

Methodology

1. Collect biodiversity observations (point locations)
2. Derive and select the relevant environnemental variables
3. Model species distribution using SDMs
4. Combine all the results (# models, # species)
5. Apply land use change and climate change scenarios
6. Assess hot spots of biodiversity and priorities of conservation

See presentation below