New models show how species will be relocated by climate change
Scientists at Duke University are harnessing the power of big data and geospatial analysis to create new ways to track the effects of climate change on species and food webs. Their work, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA, began in 2018 and has already yielded two powerful new tools.
One of the tools is an interactive web portal that projects how a species could impact other species as it relocates and competes for suitable habitats in a warming world.
The other is a probabilistic framework that can be used to overcome gaps in data and identify direct and indirect impacts of environmental change on a community of species.
Understanding these interactions and anticipating their effects is essential for developing effective conservation policies and practices, said Jennifer Swenson, associate professor of the practice of geospatial analysis, who is also a co-principal investigator of the project.
The new Predicting Biodiversity with a Generalized Joint Attribution Model (PBGJAM) web portal is being developed to help scientists, landowners and decision makers see those larger impacts. It synthesizes decades of satellite, airborne and ground-based data on multiple species, along with climate predictions and ecological forecasts, to track how species' ranges are shifting in response to rising temperatures, more frequent droughts and other environmental changes. Read original full article
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