Predicting the locations where plant species occur, or could occur, is a critical challenge for ecologists in the coming decades. As the global climate alters, it changes where different plants can persist. As a result, it is imperative that we understand how plant populations respond to climatic constraints and use that information to predict how they are likely to respond to climatic changes in the future. Forecasts of plant redistributions on Earth due to climate change have been focused on estimating losses in the amount and quality of habitat conditions. However, an important consequence of environmental changes on living organisms has remained largely unexplored: the spatial reconfiguration of suitable habitats, such as the increasing loss of connection between habitat patches throughout species’ area of distribution.
Plants support the very survival of the human race. They provide us food, pastures for livestock, and places for recreation and wellbeing. They also directly and indirectly provide numerous invaluable ecosystem services such as water regulation, carbon sequestration and flood prevention. To safeguard these ecosystem services, we need to provide conservation managers robust ecological models able to identify species vulnerable or resistant to deteriorating habitat conditions or to major habitat reconfigurations.
During GEODEM I examined the geographic configuration of habitat patches suitable for hundreds of plant species. My aim was to develop predictive models of how these biogeographic patterns vary with species’ biological properties and geophysical constraints on the persistence and expansion of plant populations.
