There is a growing awareness of the potential impacts of climate change on biodiversity. However, predictions of future impacts are fraught with ecological as well as algorithms uncertainties from models. In this project an attempt will be made to reduce uncertainties of climate change impacts on biodiversity. This will be achieved by developing new approaches for ensemble forecasting of species distributions; an idea that has been extensively developed in BIOCHANGE lab in collaboration with other researchers. To this end open-source software for modeling species distributions will be developed and made available to the wider community. Novel approaches will also be developed to validate models using palaeoecological and palaeoclimate data. This projects constitutes: (i) the first large scale evaluation of climate change impacts on Latin American biodiversity; and (ii) the most comprehensive ensemble forecasting exercise done so far, using a large range of climate and bioclimate simulations.

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Richness of threatened bird species in Latin America

In BIOIMPACTO, an attempt will be made to model a new potential source of threat – climate change – for birds and other vertebrate groups in Latin America.