Program Leader: Professor Steve Turton, James Cook
University
Climate change is one of the most significant
threats to global biodiversity and human well-being. Global
biodiversity is concentrated in the tropics, with high levels of
endemism in regions such as the Wet Tropics World Heritage
Area. However, what is very unclear is how climate change
will impact at the regional level.
Program 5ii will focus on delivering
strategic knowledge on the impact that climate change is having and
will have on North Queensland’s tropical forests, and
management options for how to mitigate against the negative
impacts. It will provide early identification of the risks
and threats posed by climate change to North Queensland’s key
terrestrial environmental assets and early advice on options to
mitigate and better manage these threats and reduce the
risks. It will also provide advice on the resilience or lack
of resilience of different terrestrial ecosystems and
biodiversity.
The Program will:
-
Develop improved regional scenarios and understanding of future
climate change relevant to North Queensland’s tropical
forests, such as increased temperature in mountainous areas,
changes in patterns of rainfall, clouds, extreme weather events and
CO2 dynamics;
-
Develop landscape-level indicators for ecosystem response to
climate change;
-
Assess the potential of Wet Tropics vertebrates to adapt to
predicted future climatic changes and predict the risk of
extinction through climate change;
-
Identify how, at the local level, plant communities and the
biodiversity associated with them respond to current climate
variability in terms of water stress, flowering and fruiting,
carbon use and storage; and
-
Scale-up from these data to provide regional scenarios.
Finally, the Program will produce regional
maps (projected to year 2050) outlining likely changes to North
Queensland ecosystems given a variety of scenarios for future
warming, responses of biota and management interventions.
Program 5ii involves four Projects:
Project
2.5ii.1 - Regional climate projections for tropical
rainforests
Project
2.5ii.2 - Climate change: scaling from trees to
ecosystems
Project
2.5ii.3 - Understanding climate change threats to ecosystem and
ecological processes
Project
2.5ii.4 - Impacts of climate change on biodiversity
