Do you work with species distribution modelling from the perspective of climate change? In that case, this paper is FOR YOU. Working with species distribution, but don’t really care about climate change? This paper is still FOR YOU.

In this article Buisson and colleagues tackle the fundamental problem of uncertainty in projecting species distribution shifts under climate change. The work is pretty breath taking: 35 species, 100 partitions of data, 7 different statistical modelling methods, 3 climate models, 4 emission scenarios and 3 different time steps (2020, 2050 and 2080), resulting in a staggering 8 400 different projection per species per time step. Not to mention the numerous PCAs and one phylogenetic tree done within this study.

This paper shows, statistically quite convincingly, that the greatest contributors to the variation in model results are in fact the statistical methods we use for projecting the likelihood of a species to occur in given climate conditions. Thus, the selection of modelling method, or even the decision of using just one instead of several, should be done with care. Unfortunately this paper does not go on by making any suggestions about which methods to choose, but instead underlines the need of using several modelling methods and presenting not just the results across them, but also the uncertainty related to them.

Buisson and colleagues have really done a comprehensive and good work: The paper is full with technical details, tests and analyses, but the text has been written so that the reader does not get lost in the jungle of residuals, autocorrelations and standard deviations. The only weakness we could find was the fact that the individual model performance and how this relates to the high variation in model results was not reported. Reading between the lines it could be that the authors have decided to save this the sequel. And we can’t really blame them – this paper definitely had information worth of several papers. Excellent job!

Final conclusions: You have to read this :)!

Buisson, L., Thuiller, W., Casajus, N., Lek, S. and Grenouillet, G. (2010) Uncertainty in ensemble forecasting of species distribution. Global Change Biology, 16, 1147-1157.

Wiens & Bachelet: Matching the multiple scales of conservation with the multiple scales of climate change

DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01409.x

This was an extensive article on scale issues in conservation and climate change. It seemed to be targeted at a rather general public, and was therefore very refreshing reading for us. It had a strong NGO perspective due to the authors’ backgrounds, which showed for example in that the issues with conservation scales were largely dealt with through practical examples. This was slightly disappointing for us as conservation scientists. The CC section had a stronger scientific focus, and was more informative for us, for example, we realized we know very little about the Regional Climate Models and “dynamic downscaling” discussed in the paper.  But we felt that this distinction in approaches to conservation vs. CC also reflects the real world situation – conservation planning is still done in practice with weak scientific basis, but no one is  trying to guess how the climate will change based on a feeling.

The key message was that despite all the uncertainties (especially in downscaling the very coarse climate predictions to a level useful for conservation), CC must be accounted for in conservation planning, because it is already clear that the changes will be dramatic. I suppose we agreed on this in general, but would like to emphasize even more strongly that one shouldn’t put too much weight on uncertain future in decision making, because e.g. allocating resources to areas potentially important in the future means having less for those certainly important at present, and risking losing the supposed sources of range shifts already before the shifts take place.

Tuesday 16.2.2010 at Coffeeroom (Anni, Johanna, Joona, Laura, Ninni)

In this paper the authors had used meta-analysis to review 49 published papers containing 120 comparisons of species richness between unmanaged and managed forests in Europe. Articles were chosen from year 1978 to 2007 and that obviously makes the comparison more challenging because of the different methods and styles used in a different times.

Results of the meta-analyses were quite thin if we compare them to what was expected (and that is that the biodiversity would be much greater in unmanaged forests). Species richness was used as a surrogate for biodiversity which could have been weighted differently. Now all that mattered was just the number of species. Results showed us that species richness was only slightly higher in unmanaged forests. Forest management had positive impact on vascular plants and negative impact on species which are dependent on forest cover continuity, deadwood or large trees as well as carabids.

It was said that some areas in Europe were badly represented so it would have been great to see the studying areas in a visible map. But maybe it would just have turned our thoughts away from the main issue: what do the comparisons tell us, and made us stuck with the fact that this kind of comparable information is not available everywhere. We as finns were able to be proud because the whole Scandinavia was well presented. The problem can be that there is no such a research done which would study this issue locally or the research is not a comparable one – it just studies biodiversity of one area but not with right meters or the results are in some other way incomparable.

Even though we agreed that the article didn’t give a lot of food for our thoughts we think it was a great opening for the discussion that articles (or the results) could be represented in a more congruent way, so that they could give benefit to a more extensive research too than just to authors’ own work. Authors pointed out well why this kind of reviewing is important and what kind of details, aspects or data etc. are missing from today’s scientific research work so that the weaknesses in articles and in meta-analyses could be sorted out. This hopely motivates people to continue this work even it now didn’t show much big results.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123243232/PDFSTART

Biodiversity Differences between Managed and Unmanaged Forests: Meta-Analysis of Species Richness in Europe

YOAN PAILLET, LAURENT BERGÈS, JOAKIM HJÄLTÉN, PÉTER ÓDOR, CATHERINE AVON, MARKUS BERNHARDT-RÖMERMANN, RIENK-JAN BIJLSMA, LUC DE BRUYN, MARC FUHR, ULF GRANDIN, ROBERT KANKA, LARS LUNDIN, SANDRA LUQUE, TIBOR MAGURA, SILVIA MATESANZ, ILONA MÉSZÁROS, M.-TERESA SEBASTIÀ, WOLFGANG SCHMIDT, TIBOR STANDOVÁR, BÉLA TÓTHMÉRÉSZ, ANNELI UOTILA, FERNANDO VALLADARES, KAI VELLAK, RISTO VIRTANEN

Conservation Biology, Volume 24 Issue 1 (February 2010)