One of the most alarming consequences of global biodiversity decline is species extinction, which can alter the provision of ecosystem services and have potential dramatic effects on our economy and well-being. While human-driven extinction rates are already unsustainably high, there is a risk that climate change will further exacerbate this crisis without an adequate conservation strategy in place. In other words, there is now urgent need to anticipate species decline under scenarios of global change, rather than reacting to these declines when they are already occurring. One of the key ecological traits that allows adaptation to environmental change is the breadth of a species' niche - i.e. the set of environmental conditions in which a species can persist. Yet, this important information is often ignored in conservation planning application, which focus on areas of predicted climatic stability. The goal of this project is to inform conservation applications that maximise the protection of species' climatic niches while minimising their exposure to future climate change. This will be achieved by disentangling the historical impacts of humans, climate change, and life history on the climatic niches of terrestrial mammals, to identify the key determinants of past niche change. This information will be used to identify species which are expected to be resilient to future climate change, and those that are unlikely to adapt to it. The project focusses on global terrestrial mammals, a data-rich group currently facing significant extinction rates, to develop and theoretically ground a conservation planning approach that will be also transferable to other taxa.
The UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the EU 2020 Biodiversity strategy share the target of reversing the decline of species and preventing their extinction by 2020. In view of future climatic change exacerbating the effect of direct human pressure on the environment, there is urgent need to identify optimal methods for preventing the extinction risk of species.
This project is novel in bringing together information on past change in species realised niche and how species life-history can inform the identification of resilient protected areas in view of future climate change. The main novel concepts, approaches and methods that will be employed include:
> Integrating conservation planning analyses with macroecology - this project brings together information on past direct and indirect drivers of niche change into one coherent approach, resolving the conservation dichotomy between minimising species' exposure to climate change and preserving their adaptive capacity.
> Adding an important dimension to the global debate on protected area placement - this project aims to understand the conditions in which protected areas can preserve not only the geographic distributions of species, but also their adaptability to future climate. The multi-billion dollar expansion of the global protected area estate might fall short if species' ability to adapt to future climatic conditions is lost.
> Promoting the implementation of proactive conservation policies - an improved knowledge of how risk to biodiversity can be prevented cost-effectively will allow anticipating future biodiversity decline, by exploring the potential effects of current policy decisions.