Making scientific data available to adaptation practitioners: the Wallace Initiative and ClimaScope

Governments and conservation organizations have dedicated extensive resources to protect biodiversity, but their conservation strategies have largely been developed under an assumption of a static climate. These strategies may fail with changing climates, especially when combined with existing anthropogenic pressures. We designed a system to help conservationists plan for a dynamic climate: the Wallace Initiative. This is a global effort to rapidly assess potential impacts of climate change on nearly 50,000 plant and animal species. It begins with the production of a set of alternative potential future climates, generated by the Community Integrated Assessment System (CIAS), which are used to drive 50,000 species climate envelope models produced by MaxENT. Thus we calculate projected changes in percent species richness and identify areas where biodiversity is most at risk from climate change, and conversely, those likely to be refugia. The alternative future climates we consider match the 18 GCMs used in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, so an important aspect of identifying the refugia is the degree of agreement between GCM projections. We look across several future greenhouse gas emission scenarios, with and without global efforts to mitigate emissions. This information can provide guidance to natural resource managers on how they may need to adapt to climate change to avoid biodiversity loss. It also highlights the benefits of mitigation in reducing risks to biodiversity. Managers will also need to take into account issues with spatial scale. While models might project a species being "lost" in a 0.5° x 0.5° grid, thermal buffering (e.g., from elevation, slope, aspect, canopy cover) provides guidance on areas that may allow a species to persist at smaller scales (1-5 km). This may help alleviate issues of downscaling climate change data in data-poor areas. Climate projections from CIAS, including those used in the Wallace Iniative, are available through ClimaScope, a user-friendly data visualisation engine based on flash/java which works at low bandwidth. Since development of long term adaptation options requires robust vulnerability analyses at appropriate scales, such assessments have hitherto been hindered by data quality and availability, capacity and the understanding of appropriate scales, methods and tools. ClimaScope provides maps, charts and data of projected climate changes with an indication of uncertainties. Variables available include terrestrial temperaturechange(maximum, minimum and average), total precipitation, wet-day frequency, and sea-surface temperature. Historical observed climate data is also available, and projected climates are produced for a user defined time period. Through the related Wallace Initiative web portal, for a range of climate change scenarios, practitioners can select a family, a genus, a species, a dispersal model, and access maps showing how the projected range of the species changes over time. Alternatively, climates and maps can be produced corresponding to global warmings of 2 or 3°C.