Mapping resilient landscapes to climate change in a megadiverse country

Abstract

The effects of global climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are unevenly distributed in the geographic space.Identifying sites more suitable to sustain biodiversity in a changing climate is essential to both species conservation and restoration strategies at different scales. Here, we map terrestrial climate-resilient sites for biodiversity across Brazil to identify sites with greater chances of providing suitable conditions for species to persist under regional climate change. Our mapping combines spatial metrics based on landscape heterogeneity, a proxy for microclimatic variability, and local connectedness, a measure of connectivity between habitats, to determine landscape resilience, assuming that resilience to climate change will be greater the more heterogeneous the characteristics of local habitats are and the more connected they are in the landscape. Our results show that within each biome,medium to high resilient sites are mostly found in the Amazon (40% of the biome) and Pantanal (38%). Low resilience, conversely,is concentrated in the Atlantic Forest (41% of the biome), followed by Cerrado (37%), Pampa (36%), and Caatinga (34%). Land scape resilience information has the potential to be used to effectively guide decision-making and public policy on strategies for conserva-tion, restoration, and sustainable use practices. Priority for conservation should be on high resilience sites as they have the potential to sustain biodiversity in face of undergoing and future climate change. Other approaches could be used in situations of medium to low resilience also, such as: conservation of current corridors in sites with high local connectedness, but low landscape heterogeneity; restoration of natural vegetation on sites that show high landscape heterogeneity, but low local connectedness; and sustainable prac-tices in areas of low resilience. Our study provides an updated method to pinpoint climate-resilient sites for biodiversity which was applied to a megadiverse country but is applicable to any ecosystem around the globe.