Assessing the impact of climate change on habitat for at-risk amphibians in the Pacific Northwest: which species are suitable for species distribution modeling?
Preliminary Findings
Dates
Publication Date
2023-04-24
Citation
Sky Button, and Jonah Povia-Scott, 2023, Assessing the impact of climate change on habitat for at-risk amphibians in the Pacific Northwest: which species are suitable for species distribution modeling?
Summary
The Pacific Northwest is a hotspot for temperate amphibian biodiversity and is home to many species of salamanders and frogs found nowhere else on earth. Changing climatic conditions threaten habitat for many of these species, primarily through increased air and water temperature and the drying of habitats. Among the most commonly used tools for evaluating the potential impacts of climate change on habitat suitability are species distribution models (SDMs). This approach develops models that describe suitable habitat for a focal species (or set of species) based on relationships between environmental variables and contemporary species occurrences. These models can then be used to predict changes in the availability of suitable habitat [...]
Summary
The Pacific Northwest is a hotspot for temperate amphibian biodiversity and is home to many species of salamanders and frogs found nowhere else on earth. Changing climatic conditions threaten habitat for many of these species, primarily through increased air and water temperature and the drying of habitats. Among the most commonly used tools for evaluating the potential impacts of climate change on habitat suitability are species distribution models (SDMs). This approach develops models that describe suitable habitat for a focal species (or set of species) based on relationships between environmental variables and contemporary species occurrences. These models can then be used to predict changes in the availability of suitable habitat for these species using anticipated values of environmental variables derived from climate projections. However, this approach is only likely to yield robust predictions about the impacts of climate change when certain criteria are met. More specifically, the environmental variables used to develop the SDMs should be closely linked to the species’ habitat requirements and should be available at a spatial resolution consistent with the species’ habitat use, in addition there must be sufficient contemporary species occurrence data from throughout the range of the target organisms to develop a robust model. As a first step towards assessing climate impacts on at-risk amphibians in the Pacific Northwest, we evaluated whether these criteria were met for 17 amphibian species of greatest conservation need in the region (Tables 1 and 2). We found that overall feasibility for SDMs was high for 7 of these species. Efforts to model habitat suitability are already being conducted by other research groups for 3 of these 7 species. For the remaining 4 species, we provide a review of scientific literature relevant to the development of SDMs for these species. Developing these SDMs and using climate projections to predict changes in habitat suitability will comprise the next phase of our project.
