A single species’ ability to shift its range as the climate warms can be blocked by a ploughed field or a housing estate, yet global biodiversity models currently ignore this interaction between land use and climate change. Most models treat habitat loss and climate change as separate pressures, missing the fact that fragmented landscapes trap species in place while also exposing them to more extreme local temperatures—agricultural land can be several degrees hotter than nearby forest. This blind spot is especially acute for insects, which make up the vast majority of animal species but are rarely included in global assessments. The project will build new models that, for the first time, capture how habitat fragmentation and local microclimates together drive species movement across continents. By combining satellite data on land cover with field measurements of temperature variation, the team will produce projections of biodiversity change that account for these interacting pressures. The work is fundamentally curiosity-driven—it aims to understand how the natural world actually responds to multiple human pressures—but the outputs could directly inform conservation planning, agricultural policy, and the design of wildlife corridors that remain effective under future climates.
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Human actions are causing profound changes to the world’s biodiversity. Our understanding of these changes is still remarkably limited, especially in tropical regions, and for animals other than birds and mammals. Yet, biodiversity supports natural systems and delivers many direct benefits to human societies such as pollination, control of pest populations, and disease regulation. Developing a deeper understanding of the causes of global biodiversity changes is a critical research frontier. On land, the main drivers of biodiversity change are land-use change (largely for agriculture) and climate change. We are beginning to uncover examples where the effects of land use and climate interact, often increasing rates of biodiversity change compared to if these pressures acted alone. Such an interaction comes about for two main reasons. First, when we remove natural habitats, we create barriers that make it harder for many species to move to new suitable areas as the climate changes. Second, agricultural areas and cities experience hotter heat waves and colder night-time temperatures, adding to the effects of global climate change. Despite some recent advances, our knowledge of the effects of land-use-climate interactions is limited to a few well-studied locations and groups of species. Global biodiversity models help to fill our knowledge gaps, and models that predict the effects of environmental changes on the distribution of species across landscapes are a particularly influential example. Such models allow us to compare observed with predicted biodiversity changes to identify key drivers, build a complete picture of when and where the biggest changes are happening, and make predictions of future changes. Biodiversity models fill a similar role as climate models, but are in a much earlier stage of development, and crucially do not capture the interaction of land use and climate. Our project will develop cutting-edge global models predicting the movement of species distributions across continental or global landscapes under climate change and land-use change, capturing, for the first time at such large extents, the effects of both habitat fragmentation and variation in local climatic conditions among different habitats. This will enable the most comprehensive assessment yet of the effect of these key drivers of biodiversity change across multiple different groups of animals: the better-studied vertebrates, but also insects, which are typically neglected. The development of the new models (WP3 and 4) will be informed by novel analyses of global data describing observed changes in species distributions (WP2), revealing which regions and groups of species are most at risk under ongoing rapid land-use and climate change. All of this will be underpinned by the development of new estimates of how different land uses impact fine-scale local climatic conditions (WP1). Together, the insights will allow the most robust projections yet of future biodiversity changes, which will be subjected to a full accounting of uncertainty and evaluated against independent data. The project will have four main outputs: 1) identification of the species and regions most at risk of unanticipated biodiversity changes; 2) a new global biodiversity modelling paradigm that can be adapted to address new questions regarding biodiversity change, such as the crucial but neglected role of species interactions; 3) a new framework for evaluating model projections against independent observations of species occurrence changes; and 4) a new curated global database describing changes over time in species' occurrence in different areas.
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