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Strategies for mammal conservation under climate change in the Amazon

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Abstract

Climate change is not only a major threat to biodiversity, it is also a big challenge to the development of conservation strategies. Scientists and practitioners need to select or avoid areas at greatest risk for species protection, i.e., acting in a proactive or a reactive manner. This proactive/reactive dichotomy takes a particular formulation under the likely changes in climate. Selecting for low-risk areas (usually referred to as climate refugia) is supposed to protect more species with a greater guarantee of their long-term persistence. As a consequence, populations at greatest risk are left unprotected and probably committed to extinction. On the other hand, managing species in high-risk areas is more expensive than setting aside areas of climate refugia and encompasses a set of uncertainties, which makes highly-threatened species more costly and difficult to save. Here, we combine ecological niche models and metrics of climate change to develop spatial conservation schemes for mammals in the Brazilian Amazon. These schemes efficiently identify networks of high-risk and refugia priority areas within species current and future distributions, while complementing the protection already achieved by the Amazon’s network of protected areas (PAs). We found that, on average, 25% of mammal distribution is already represented in the established network of PAs. Also, 26% of high-risk and 17% of refugia priority areas overlap with indigenous lands. In addition, species distributions were found mostly in high-risk, compared to in refugia priority areas. We highlight that the strategy to be employed does not necessarily should be binary and a mix of both strategies would guarantee the protection of a larger number of species.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Fernanda Brum, Paulo De Marco Júnior and Nathália Machado, Javaria Altaf and three anonymous reviewers for comments that greatly improved the quality of this manuscript. We also thank Geiziane Tessarolo for help with ENMs and Raquel Garcia for providing the scripts of climate change metrics. B.R.R. and L.P.S were supported by CNPq and CAPES Scholarships, respectively. RL research is funded by CNPq (Grant 308532/2014-7), O Boticário Group Foundation for Nature Protection (Grant PROG_0008_2013), and CNCFlora (Grant 065/2016). This paper is a contribution of the Brazilian Network on Global Climate Change Research funded by CNPq (Grant 437167/2016-0) and FINEP (Grant 01.13.0353.00) and of the INCT in Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity Conservation founded by MCTIC/CNPq/FAPEG (Grant 465610/2014-5).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratório de Biogeografia da Conservação, Departamento de Ecologia, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, GO, Brazil

    Bruno R. Ribeiro, Lilian P. Sales & Rafael Loyola

  2. Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia e Evolução, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Avenida Esperança s/n, Campus Samambaia, Goiânia, GO, CEP 74.690-900, Brazil

    Bruno R. Ribeiro & Lilian P. Sales

  3. Brazilian Research Network on Climate Change – Rede Clima, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil

    Rafael Loyola

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  1. Bruno R. Ribeiro
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Correspondence to Bruno R. Ribeiro.

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Communicated by David Hawksworth.

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Ribeiro, B.R., Sales, L.P. & Loyola, R. Strategies for mammal conservation under climate change in the Amazon. Biodivers Conserv 27, 1943–1959 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-018-1518-x

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