‘Predicting the impact of climate change on Latin American biodiversity’

David Nogués Bravo, Enrique Martínez-Meyer, Jesús Rodríguez Méndez, José Alexandre Felizola Diniz-Filho, Luis Mauricio Bini, Miguel Bastos Araujo, Miguel Nakamura Savoy, Víctor Sánchez Cordero.

The project’s differential features are (i) it will be the first assessment of the biodiversity impact of climate change spanning all of Latin America, and (ii) it will be the first study of its kind to envisage the modelling of climate-change impacts using a large number of bioclimatic models, parameterisation techniques and climate scenarios, providing a more precise measurement of results uncertainty and obtaining consensus forecasts. .

The climate-change modelling tools developed for this project have also been applied to examining the causes of the extinction of the woolly mammoth, with results published in the scientific journal PLoS Biology (See article). This study concludes that planetary heating restricted the habitats suitable for the mammoth to parts of the Arctic, while a northward wave of human migration produced the final ‘coup de grâce’.