CliMAS Suitability: Visualising climate space and distribution of Australian Terrestrial Vertebrates

Brief description

The CliMAS Suitability site provides users with access to projected environmental suitability maps for Australian terrestrial vertebrate species under various climate change scenarios.

Full description

Currently there is a general lack of engagement and knowledge transfer between professional researchers and end-users of research (general public, conservation managers, decision-makers, etc.). This is reflected in a general lack of acceptance and acknowledgement by the public and stakeholders of the potential impacts of climate change, particularly on biodiversity.

Recently, researchers have begun to endeavour to make the results of their research public, however there is a scarcity online tools that display species distribution data. The CliMAS Suitability site provides a tool that reuses data available with Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and the Tropical Data Hub to allow a broad range of end-users to explore the potential impacts of climate change on terrestrial vertebrate species in Australia.

Process

The project produces both current and future climate suitability data for each species. Users visiting the project website can browse visual representations of both datasets and download data from the site or from the Tropical Data Hub.

The data is a set of current and future climate suitability maps for each species. These use the occurrence records cleaned by experts and the MaxEnt algorithm to calculate climatological sensitivities for the species, then use those sensitivities to map climate/species suitability across Australia. Future climate data is projected using climate change scenarios described by the IPCC AR5 report and consolidated across a number of climate models, such that a climate suitability map is available for each intersection of a climate scenario and year modelled.

The datasets represent species distributions based on occurrence records from ALA prior to November 2012.