Modelagem de mudanças climáticas: do nicho fundamental à conservação da biodiversidade

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2016-03-07

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Universidade Federal de Goiás

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The climate changes are one of the major threats to the biodiversity and it is expected to increase its impact along the 21st century. The climate change affect all levels of the biodiversity from individuals to biomes, reducing the ecosystem services. Despite of this, the prediction of climate change impacts on biodiversity is still a challenge. Overcoming these issues depends on improvements in different aspects of science that support predictions of climate change impact on biodiversity. The common practice to predict the climate change impact consists in formulate ecological niche models based in the current climate and project the changes based in the future climate predicted by the climate models. However, there are some recognized limitations both in the formulation of the ecological niche model and in the use of predictions from the climate models that need to be analyzed. Here, in the first chapter we review the science behind the climate models in order to reduce the knowledge gap between the scientific community that formulate the climate models and the community that use the predictions of these models. We showed that there is not consensus about evaluate the climate models, obtain regional models with higher spatial resolution and define consensual models. However, we gave some guidelines for use the predictions of the climate models. In the second chapter, we tested if the predictions of correlative ecological niche models fitted with presence-absence match the predictions of models fitted with abundance data on the metrics of climate change impact on orchid bees in the Atlantic Forest. We found that the presence-absence models were a partial proxy of change in abundance when the output of the models was continuous, but the same was not true when the predictions were converted to binary. The orchid bees in general will decrease the abundance in the future, but will retain a good amount of suitable sites in the future and the distance to gained climatic suitable areas can be very close, despite of great variation. The change in the species richness and turnover will be mainly in the western and some regions of southern of the Atlantic Forest. In the third chapter, we discussed the drawbacks in using the estimations of realized niche instead the fundamental niche, such as overpredicting the effect of climate change on species’ extinction risk. We proposed a framework based on phylogenetic comparative and missing data methods to predict the dimensions of the fundamental niche of species with missing data. Moreover, we explore sources of uncertainty in predictions of fundamental niche and highlight future directions to overcome current limitations of phylogenetic comparative and missing data methods to improve predictions. We conclude that it is possible to make better use of the current knowledge about species’ fundamental niche with phylogenetic information and auxiliary traits to predict the fundamental niche of poorly-studied species. In the fourth chapter, we used the framework of the chapter three to test the performance of two recent phylogenetic modeling methods to predict the thermal niche of mammals. We showed that PhyloPars had better performance than Phylogenetic Eigenvector Maps in predict the thermal niche. Moreover, the error and bias had similar phylogenetic pattern for both margins of the thermal niche while they had differences in the geographic pattern. The variance in the performance was explained by taxonomic differences and not by methodological aspects. Finally, our models better predicted the upper margin than the lower margin of the thermal niche. This is a good news for predicting the effect of climate change on species without physiological data. We hope our finds can be used to improve the predictions of climate change effect on the biodiversity in future studies and support the political decisions on minimizing the effects of climate change on biodiversity.

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FALEIRO, Frederico Augusto Martins Valtuille. Modelagem de mudanças climáticas: do nicho fundamental à conservação da biodiversidade. 2016.139 f. Tese (Doutorado em Ecologia e Evolução) - Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, 2015.