TITLE:
Stability of Brazilian Seasonally Dry Forests under Climate Change: Inferences for Long-Term Conservation
AUTHORS:
Rosane G. Collevatti, Matheus Souza Lima-Ribeiro, José Alexandre F. Diniz-Filho, Guilherme Oliveira, Ricardo Dobrovolski, Levi Carina Terribile
KEYWORDS:
Cerrado Biome; Ecological Niche Modelling; Global Climate Change; Quaternary Climate Change; Gap Analysis
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Plant Sciences,
Vol.4 No.4,
April
12,
2013
ABSTRACT:
We
identified climatically stable areas of seasonally dry forests (SDFs) from
Central Brazil through time and assessed the effectiveness of the current
reserves network in representing these climatically stable areas, as well as
areas of high suitability in the present or in the future only. We used an ensemble
approach based on several methods for ecological niche modelling (ENMs) to
obtain potential distributions 16 SDF’ species for past (last glacial maximum),
present, and future (end of XXI century) climate scenarios. We then computed
how many current Brazilian reserves matched both stable areas (suitable areas
for all time periods), present and future geographical ranges alone for each
species, in a multi-level gap analysis. We found range shifts due to climate changes for
SDF’ species. Although the future geographical range and stable areas for all analyzed
species matched at least with one reserve, many protected areas will lose
importance in protecting suitable areas for species in the future. Moreover,
the current Brazilian reserves cover only a small amount of their climatically
stable areas. However, some reserves will be suitable for many SDF’ species (90%) at the same time, but climatically
stable for only half of them. Our findings show that vegetation community from
SDFs may persist in Brazilian territories until the end of XXI century, and
challenges about long-term conservation of the SDFs may be partially reached with already
existing Brazilian reserve network, however the reserves should be connected to
permit habitat tracking.