Quantifying the effect of projected abrupt climate change on global biodiversity

The fate of species and ecological communities in the face of novel climatic futures is increasingly becoming a topic of great concern. However, a large majority of climate change vulnerability studies consider futures of warming without incorporating the emergence of rapid and large-scale collapse of climate subsystems in the form of breaching tipping points. These drastic changes likely have major impacts on ecosystems worldwide, exposing species to stressful novel climate conditions without the time for adaptation or dispersal. My PhD thesis seeks to build an integrative, multi-dimensional view of this impact, understanding specific climatic variables that present risks in different regions and taxa.

I carry out these analyses using high-resolution daily-scale projections in the past and future for temperature and precipitation in three scenarios - one with only warming, one with warming and the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), and one with warming and the loss of the Amazon Rainforest. From this, I synthesize trends in a wide variety of climate variables, including maxima/minima of temperature/precipitation, annual-scale seasonality and climate variability, and the occurrence and properties of extreme events (namely heat-waves, cold-spells, and droughts). In my analysis, I also include an unprecedented amount of biodiversity, incorporating 54,250 species of terrestrial animals.

My PhD aims to lead towards identifying vulnerability scores for individual species and ecosystems, highlighting specific climatic changes most likely to drive biodiversity loss in different tipping-point scenarios, and identifying areas of significant conservation interest.