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Climate change threatens protected areas of the Atlantic Forest

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Abstract

Only 7 % of the Atlantic Forest Biodiversity Hotspot is currently protected, though it holds 18 % of all amphibian species in South America. How effective would the Atlantic Forest network of protected areas (PAs) be in a changing climate? Are there some intrinsic features of PAs that drive species loss or gain inside them? We addressed these questions by modeling the ecological niches of 430 amphibian species in the Atlantic Forest and projecting their distributions into three future climate change simulations. We then assessed changes in species richness inside PAs for different time frames and tested their significance via null model. The number of species should decline within Atlantic Forest network of PAs under changing climate conditions. Only altitude was a good predictor of species gains or lost inside PAs. Therefore, we suggest that new PAs established in highlands would be more effective to alleviate the effects of climate change on this imperiled fauna.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge T.F. Rangel for providing access to the BioEnsembles platform used in the analyses. PL received a PhD scholarship from CNPq. RDL and ASM received research productivity fellowships granted by CNPq (Grants #304703/2011-7 and #307479/2011-0, respectively). RDL’s work is funded by the Brazilian Research Network on Global Climate Change (Rede CLIMA), Conservation International Brazil, and by Fundação Grupo O Boticário de Proteção à Natureza (Prog #08_2013). We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for critical comments and editing of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pós Graduação em Ecologia e Evolução, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil

    Priscila Lemes

  2. Departamento de Ecologia, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Caixa Postal 131, Goiânia, Goiás, 74001-970, Brazil

    Adriano Sanches Melo & Rafael Dias Loyola

Authors
  1. Priscila Lemes
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  2. Adriano Sanches Melo
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Correspondence to Rafael Dias Loyola.

Electronic supplementary material

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Online Resource 1

Number of Atlantic Forest amphibian species projected to be found in PAs in current time and in the future (2050) under different dispersal scenarios.(DOCX 37 kb)

Online Resource 2

Amphibian species richness patterns in the Atlantic Forest projected for the present and for future climates (for each climate models CCCMA-CGCM2, CSIRO-MK2, and HCCPR-HadCM3) by different modeling methods (Generalized Additive Models, GAM; Generalized Linear Models, GLM; Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines, MARS; Maximum Entropy, MaxEnt; Genetic algorithm for Rule set Production, GARP; Random Forest, RF) (TIFF 1,847 kb)

Online Resource 3

Expected changes in the spatial pattern for the four climatic variables used to model species’ ecological niches in the Atlantic Forest. Maps represent the current and future conditions for CCCMA-CGCM2, CSIRO-MK2, and HCCPR-HadCM3 climate models in 2050 (TIFF 4,206 kb)

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Lemes, P., Melo, A.S. & Loyola, R.D. Climate change threatens protected areas of the Atlantic Forest. Biodivers Conserv 23, 357–368 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-013-0605-2

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