CMI Annual Report 2021

Improving Forecasts of How Biodiversity Responds
to Climate Change
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: JONATHAN LEVINE
At a Glance
To accurately assess the biodiversity benefits of slowing
climate change through land-based climate solutions, the
Levine group is challenging key mathematical assumptions in
the leading biogeographic modeling tools for forecasting
biodiversity response to climate and developing solutions
critical for their accurate implementation. Reliably gauging
the impact of mitigation initiatives on biodiversity is vital to
current bp efforts towards a sustainable energy world.
Research Highlight
Land-based climate solutions have great potential to slow
climate change and will thereby benefit global biodiversity.
Countering this benefit, however, are the biodiversity impacts
of the land use change associated with some of these solutions,
including for example, afforestation or bioenergy with carbon
capture. Weighing the costs and the benefits of land-based
climate solutions for global biodiversity therefore requires
accurate predictions of how climate change impacts
biodiversity.
“Species distribution models” are ecologists’ best tools for
forecasting biodiversity responses to climate change. They
underlie nearly all research quantitatively predicting global
biodiversity under a future climate. These models take known
occurrences of a given species today, align those occurrences
with current climate and other environmental variables, and
then explore how the species’ distributional range will shift
with changing climate variables.
Researchers can predict how the diversity of species at each
geographic location changes with future climate when this
approach is repeated for many taxa. As powerful as these
approaches are, research in the Levine group has shown that
key mathematical assumptions in these models are
undermining our ability to draw meaningful conclusions,
leading to erroneous estimates of biodiversity responses to
climate change.
Carbon Mitigation Initiative Twenty-first Year Report 2021 38