Project 2.5ii.4 - Impacts of climate change on biodiversity

Project Leader:  Associate Professor Steve Williams, James Cook University 

Similarly to Project 2.5ii.3, this Project will also utilise a series of well-established sites on altitudinal and regional transects and existing forest plots to examine responses at the ecosystem and species level to climate change. Both projects will take advantage of existing data from ten to twenty-five years' collections at these sites/plots by the CSIRO, James Cook University and through the Rainforest CRC.

The overall objectives of Project 2.5ii.4 are to:

Extinction vulnerability

• assess the relative extinction proneness and vulnerability of all rainforest vertebrate species to predicted climate changes including physiological tolerances and potential ecological responses that buffer the species from impacts;

Resilience, ecological responses, plasticity, refugia (topographic, micro-habitat)

• quantify patterns of distribution and abundance of selected faunal groups, and existing levels of niche breadth and ecological plasticity with respect to climatic variables, habitat type, topography, life history traits and ecology;

• identify geographic areas that potentially provide thermally-buffered habitats and measure the actual degree of microclimatic buffering across the main environmental gradients within identified refugia, replicated both temporally and spatially;

• produce regional GIS coverages of microclimate based on regional climatic layers calibrated by empirical microclimate data, and to use these higher-resolution, targeted data to improve predictive spatial models of species distributions and impact predictions;

• obtain empirical measurements of net primary productivity across altitudinal/latitudinal gradients within the Wet Tropics region to test hypotheses that increasing primary productivity may alleviate impacts on biodiversity;

• provide management and policy recommendations on adaptation to climate change impacts and provide the knowledge to maximise the efficient utilisation of management resources across species and geographic areas;

Physiological tolerances of threatened species (arboreal mammals, microhylid frogs)

• determine the physiological range and tolerances, and potential for adaptation, of those species predicted to be most at risk under climatic changes.