54. Future Species Distributions

Organised by Barry Brook, to be held at University of Adelaide. First meeting 25-29 May 2009

PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE Barry Brook - U Adelaide - metapopulation models and extinction risk assessment David Keith - NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change - plant population biology and modelling Resit Akçakaya - Stony Brook U, USA - metapopulation models and extinction risk assessment Miguel Araújo - Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Spain - bioclimatic and habitat modelling Richard Pearson - American Museum of Natural History, USA - bioclimatic and habitat modelling David Hilbert - CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Townsville - rainforest and tropical agro-systems Colin Yates - WA Dept. Environ. Conservation - vegetation dynamics and fire ecology Jane Elith - U Melbourne - species and community distribution modelling John Morgan - La Trobe U - plant ecology, vegetation dynamics Michelle Leishman - Macquarie U - ecological strategies of plants Steve Williams - James Cook U - vertebrate biodiversity and impacts of climate change Peter Wilson - Macquarie U - species distribution modelling Andrew Lowe - SA Herbarium - plant population genetics Damien Fordham - U Adelaide - post-doctoral fellow; modelling Brendan Wintle - U Melbourne - ecological modelling

May 09 >

GOAL

Climate change is recognized as a major threat to biodiversity by the Convention on Biological Diversity. Climate change impacts on species’ ranges, phenology and physiology have already been widely documented. However, extrapolating these observed impacts to predictions of increased extinction risk at the species level has proven difficult. Most current methods for evaluating the effects of climate change on biodiversity consider only changes in the quantity of suitable habitat. A common approach to investigating this involves bioclimatic modelling, which projects future distributions of species under the assumption that the current climatic constraints that define a species’ distribution reflect its environmental preferences, and will therefore be retained under climate change (thus, often resulting in shifts in species' ranges towards poles or higher elevations).

The key motivation for this workshop is to develop methods that move beyond climate-envelope approaches to more realistically incorporate mechanisms that drive species distribution and abundance – essentially, a “whole ecology” viability modelling approach. The focus will be on Australian plant examples. Demographic processes (dispersal, population fluctuations and trends in vital rates), the spatial structure of the landscape, and synergistic interactions (e.g., between habitat fragmentation and climate change shifts) will be coupled using the RAMAS GIS (software for Population Viability Analysis) and BIOMOD (a computer platform for fitting ensembles of bioclimate envelope models). These models will be used to identify which species are likely to loose or gain under future climate/land-use change, and how this varies according to taxonomic, spatial or environmental properties.

Last Updated October 2008