Hoping the best, expecting the worst: forecasting the potential impacts of climate and land-use change on Iberian plants of conservation concern

ABSTRACT

Background: Worldwide, halting biodiversity loss is still a major challenge. Climate and land-use change (CLUC) are major drivers of species decline, and further expected to drive species’ future ranges. Understanding how these changes may impact species in the future is thus of utmost importance in the context of conservation and monitoring. This is especially critical for species of conservation concern, known to be more prone to extinction under environmental change.

Aims: Here we addressed how CLUC may affect future distributions of 64 plant species designated under conservation legislation for Portugal and Spain. Current and future species distributions were modelled and projected under three CLUC scenarios. Range changes were analysed for each species and IUCN category, considering climate versus land-use change models, and the trade-offs between them.

Results: Overall, our results depict consistent trends in the distribution of the targeted species under CLUC. The results also highlight potential extinction for some of the targeted species under climate change. However, under land-use change, 10 species are likely to expand their suitable habitat.

Conclusions: Our research advances existing knowledge on how climate and land-use change may impact species of conservation concern in the Iberian Peninsula. Such knowledge is essential if further losses of species of conservation concern are to be proactively anticipated. Ultimately, such information can be useful to support data-driven conservation programmes and decision-making in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Biodiversity conservation
• environmental change
• IUCN
• risk assessment
• species of conservation concern

Acknowledgements

C.A. and B.M. were supported by FCT by national and European funds (ESF) through PhD grant SFRH/BD/115127/2016 and SFRH/BD/99469/2014, respectively. A. L. research is funded by national funds by FCT –Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I. P. A. L. to SYNTHESYS Project (ESTAF-2669) at MNCNCSIC. R.S.S. to BELSPO (PhDgrant at KU-Leuven, FORBIO Climate project). The authors would like to thank M. B. Araújo and P. Alves for thoughtful comments on an early stage of this research, and D. McCracken for the English review of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Additional information

Funding

This research received support from the SYNTHESYS Project which is financed by the European Community Research Infrastructure Action under the FP7 ‘Capacities’ Programme at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (CSIC) (Reference: ES-TAF-2669).

Notes on contributors

Cristiana Alves

Cristiana Alves is a Ph.D. student. Her research interests include plant diversity and distribution, and their interactions (competition or facilitation) under environmental changes.

Rita Sousa-Silva

Rita Sousa-Silva is a postdoctoral researcher. Her research focuses on the link between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and the impact of global changes on biodiversity.

Bruno Marcos

Bruno Marcos is currently a Ph.D. student working on monitoring of wildfire disturbances, severity, recovery and resilience, and functional dynamics of ecosystems, using remote sensing.

Damien Georges

Damien Georges is a data manager and analyst specialised in the impact of global changes on vegetation dynamics in alpine and arctic ecosystems.

Angela Lomba

Angela Lomba is a postdoctoral researcher. Her research interests include understanding the drivers underlying rare species distribution, to model and anticipate the potential effects of global environmental change on the extent of their suitable habitat in the future.