title: Improving assessment and modelling of climate change impacts on global terrestrial biodiversity.
abstract: Understanding how species and ecosystems respond to climate change has become a major focus of ecology and conservation biology. Modelling approaches provide important tools for making future projections, but current models of the climate-biosphere interface remain overly simplistic, undermining the credibility of projections. We identify five ways in which substantial advances could be made in the next few years: (i) improving the accessibility and efficiency of biodiversity monitoring data, (ii) quantifying the main determinants of the sensitivity of species to climate change, (iii) incorporating community dynamics into projections of biodiversity responses, (iv) accounting for the influence of evolutionary processes on the response of species to climate change, and (v) improving the biophysical rule sets that define functional groupings of species in global models.
authors.affiliation: Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Edgewater, MD 21307, USA. mcmahons@si.edu
authors.forename: Sean M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: McMahon
authors.forename: Sandy P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Harrison
authors.forename: W Scott
authors.initials: WS
authors.lastname: Armbruster
authors.forename: Patrick J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Bartlein
authors.forename: Colin M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Beale
authors.forename: Mary E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Edwards
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kattge
authors.forename: Guy
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Midgley
authors.forename: Xavier
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Morin
authors.forename: I Colin
authors.initials: IC
authors.lastname: Prentice
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D057231:Climate Change; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000379:methods*; D017753:Ecosystem; D014644:Genetic Variation; D008954:Models, Biological; D013045:Species Specificity