| 1. |
- Pereira, Henrique M., et al.
(författare)
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Scenarios for Global Biodiversity in the 21st Century
- 2010
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Ingår i: Science. - : American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). - 0036-8075 .- 1095-9203. ; 330:6010, s. 1496-1501
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Quantitative scenarios are coming of age as a tool for evaluating the impact of future socioeconomic development pathways on biodiversity and ecosystem services. We analyze global terrestrial, freshwater, and marine biodiversity scenarios using a range of measures including extinctions, changes in species abundance, habitat loss, and distribution shifts, as well as comparing model projections to observations. Scenarios consistently indicate that biodiversity will continue to decline over the 21st century. However, the range of projected changes is much broader than most studies suggest, partly because there are major opportunities to intervene through better policies, but also because of large uncertainties in projections.
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| 2. |
- Trivino, Maria, et al.
(författare)
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Risk assessment for Iberian birds under global change
- 2013
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Ingår i: Biological Conservation. - : Elsevier BV. - 1873-2917 .- 0006-3207. ; 168, s. 192-200
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Conservation priority areas and programs are often established without consideration of future changes in species distributions. However, global change is expected to threaten the persistence of several species while offering opportunities for range expansion to others. In this study, building on previous work, we develop and implement an approach to classify bird species according to their degree of exposure and vulnerability to future climate and land-use change, including climatically driven changes in vegetation. To examine species exposure to environmental changes, we first fitted environmental envelope models and projected then into the future under scenarios of climate, land use and vegetation change. Then, we estimated species vulnerability by taking into account traits that are expected to render species vulnerable to environmental change while considering, simultaneously, the current IUCN conservation status of species. Our results show that bird species highly (and negatively) exposed to future environmental changes are currently less threatened and possess characteristics that render them less susceptible to local extinction than species that are less exposed. Our results reinforce the need to complement studies of global change impacts on biodiversity, typically based on assessments of species exposure to changes, with additional information related to the ability of species to persist under such changes. Nevertheless, we stress that while combining different sources of information is important, it is the comparison of outcomes from these different sources of information that enables development of alternative management strategies. Depending on the source of risk (e.g., exposure to global change versus vulnerability traits to multiple stressors) alternative conservation actions might be required. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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| 3. |
- Trivino, Maria, et al.
(författare)
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The Contribution of Vegetation and Landscape Configuration for Predicting Environmental Change Impacts on Iberian Birds
- 2011
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Ingår i: PLoS ONE. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1932-6203. ; 6:12
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Although climate is known to be one of the key factors determining animal species distributions amongst others, projections of global change impacts on their distributions often rely on bioclimatic envelope models. Vegetation structure and landscape configuration are also key determinants of distributions, but they are rarely considered in such assessments. We explore the consequences of using simulated vegetation structure and composition as well as its associated landscape configuration in models projecting global change effects on Iberian bird species distributions. Both present-day and future distributions were modelled for 168 bird species using two ensemble forecasting methods: Random Forests (RF) and Boosted Regression Trees (BRT). For each species, several models were created, differing in the predictor variables used (climate, vegetation, and landscape configuration). Discrimination ability of each model in the present-day was then tested with four commonly used evaluation methods (AUC, TSS, specificity and sensitivity). The different sets of predictor variables yielded similar spatial patterns for well-modelled species, but the future projections diverged for poorly-modelled species. Models using all predictor variables were not significantly better than models fitted with climate variables alone for ca. 50% of the cases. Moreover, models fitted with climate data were always better than models fitted with landscape configuration variables, and vegetation variables were found to correlate with bird species distributions in 26-40% of the cases with BRT, and in 1-18% of the cases with RF. We conclude that improvements from including vegetation and its landscape configuration variables in comparison with climate only variables might not always be as great as expected for future projections of Iberian bird species.
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