Innovative approaches to identifying regional responses of biodiversity to climate change

November 2010 to November 2013.

ARC Linkage Project LP100200080.

Investigators Dr Daniel Ramp, Dr David Warton, Dr Kim Jenkins, Dr Mick Ashcroft, Dr Patrick Driver and Dr John Gollan.

Partners include the Australian Museum, the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water, and the Central West Catchment Management Authority.

Summary

Australia is facing a biodiversity extinction crisis that is likely to be exacerbated by climate change. Existing models of climate at regional scales require significant advancement, not only to better understand impacts on biodiversity, but also to assist with decision making and adaptation strategies. We will produce innovative and robust climate maps that are at a scale that is relevant for regional management, enabling us to predict how management actions interact with climate change to affect climate and biodiversity. We innovatively identify climate refugia and quantify the effectiveness of existing processes of conservation decision making. It engages the community in climate science and provides considerable scientific training.

We aim to develop innovative approaches to identify how biodiversity responds to climate change at the regional scale. This innovative cross-disciplinary project is significant because it will produce climate models that are more detailed and better reflect the climate experienced in species habitats. We will test our climate models by predicting the distribution of biodiversity and identifying microrefugia that are relatively unaffectedby climate change. We expect to show that our innovative climate maps and statistical methods dramatically improve predictions of how biodiversity responds to regional climate change. Our findings will advance amajor paradigm shift occurring in climate change ecology and land management.

Objectives

The aim of this project is to improve predictions of the ecological consequences of climate change at regional scales via the following objectives:

1. Develop innovative, regional-scale and biologically relevant models of climate;
2. Identify patterns of climate stability and instability and quantify the implications for terrestrial and aquatic invertebrate communities;
3. Develop state-of-the-art statistical techniques to quantify relationships between biodiversity and environmental factors to model past, present and future distributions;
4. Rigorously contrast bottom-up climate models with top-down climate models at the regional scale; and
5. Quantify the efficacy of regional decision making for biodiversity conservation.

Student Projects Available – Oct 2010 until filled

The following two projects are being offered, as either Honours, MPhil or PhD projects, with $5,000 per annum top-ups scholarships. For more information please contact David Warton (david.warton@unsw.edu.au) or Daniel Ramp (d.ramp@unsw.edu.au). Both projects will be part of a new ARC linkage project beginning Nov 2010, titled “Innovative approaches to identifying regional responses of biodiversity to climate change”. This is collaborative project being supported by the ARC, the Australian Museum, the NSW Office of Water, and the Central West Catchment Management Authority.

Can we improve our understanding of the biodiversity-climate association by using better climate models?

It is of key interest to understand how biodiversity is associated with climate, in order to gain insight into the potential effects of climate change on biodiversity.  But currently, biodiversity-climate models are constructed using coarse-scale regional climate data, with little ground-truthing of these values using local and biologically relevant climate measurements.  This cross-disciplinary project will evaluate how much we can improve our current understanding of the biodiversity-climate association, when using a new fine-scale “habitat climate” model rather than the current standard “regional climate” models.  The predictive ability of these competing approaches will be compared, when predicting biodiversity of ecological communities (plant, vertebrate or invertebrate) in the Hunter region of NSW.  A novel statistical approach will be used in analysis which enables specific, quantitative and testable predictions of biodiversity response.

This project will involve training in a range of different areas – GIS, species distribution modelling, and applying modern statistical tools, and working in a cross-disciplinary team of ecologists and statisticians.

New methods to model the dynamic nature of biodiversity

It is of key interest to understand how biodiversity is associated with climate, in order to gain insight into the potential effects of climate change on biodiversity.  Current biodiversity-environment models are constructed assuming that the environment is static, when in reality it is dynamic, both within and between years.  In this project you will use ideas from repeated measures analysis to develop a new approach for predictive modelling of how biodiversity responds to a temporally varying environment, and apply this method to study the climate response of invertebrate communities in the Hunter or in an internationally recognised wetlands system.

This project will involve training in a range of different areas of statistics, focussing on random effects modelling and shrinkage estimation, repeated measures analysis, and multivariate analysis.  This project forms part of an ARC Linkage Project, and as such you will work in a cross-disciplinary team of ecologists and statisticians.