A.P. Kirilenko and R.S. Hanley (USA)
Climate change, species distribution, MaxEnt, BioClim, GARP, and data uncertainty.
The rate of current climate change during this century is likely to be faster than during any time within the last ten millennia. One of the likely consequences of this change in temperature and precipitation pattern is a northbound shift in the distributions of insects, with important consequences for natural ecosystems and agriculture. Bioclimatic approach, which correlates species distribution with environmental parameters, is used frequently to quantify this shift; however multiple methods in existence and intrinsic data uncertainty render comparison of different projections impossible. To reduce the projections’ uncertainty, we suggest an approach, which takes into account data variability and is based on employing multiple methods for generation the projections. We further illustrate this approach by projecting the climate change impact on three species of bumblebees (Bombus spp.) in North America. Climate change has dramatic effects on bumblebees, including the reduction of the available ecological niche space. The scope of these effects, however, becomes evident only based on the analysis of the entire set of equally plausible model outcomes.
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