A globally applicable indicator of the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems to retain biological diversity under climate change: The bioclimatic ecosystem resilience index

• Published in: Ecological indicators 2020-10, Vol.117, p.106554, Article 106554
• Main Authors: Ferrier, Simon, Harwood, Thomas D, Ware, Chris, Hoskins, Andrew J
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Climate change; Ecosystem resilience; Global; Indicator; Terrestrial
• ISSN: 1470-160X; 1872-7034
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolind.2020.106554

•New indicator addresses important gap in measuring progress on CBD Aichi Targets.•BERI assesses capacity of ecosystems to retain biodiversity under climate change.•Results already generated for entire global extent of Moist Tropical Forest Biome.•Now being extended to cover all forest and non-forest biomes globally. An important element of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Target 15 – i.e. to enhance “ecosystem resilience … through conservation and restoration” – remains largely unaddressed by existing indicators. We here develop an indicator addressing just one of many possible dimensions of ecosystem resilience, by focusing on the capacity of ecosystems to retain biological diversity in the face of ongoing, and uncertain, climate change. The Bioclimatic Ecosystem Resilience Index (BERI) assesses the extent to which a given spatial configuration of natural habitat will promote or hinder climate-induced shifts in biological distributions. The approach uses existing global modelling of spatial turnover in species composition within three broad biological groups (plants, invertebrates and vertebrates) to scale projected changes in composition under a plausible range of climate scenarios. These projections serve as filters through which to analyse the configuration of habitat observed at a given point in time (e.g. for a particular year) – represented as a grid in which cells are scored in terms of habitat condition. BERI is then calculated, for each cell in this grid, as a function of the connectedness of that cell to areas of natural habitat in the surrounding landscape which are projected to support a similar composition of species under climate change to that currently associated with the focal cell. All analyses are performed at 30-arcsecond grid resolution (approximately 1 km cells at the equator). Results can then be aggregated to report on status and trends for any desired set of reporting units – e.g. ecoregions, countries, or ecosystem types. We present example outputs for the Moist Tropical Forest Biome, based on a habitat-condition time series derived from the Global Forest Change dataset. We also describe how BERI is now being extended to cover all biomes (forest and non-forest) across the entire terrestrial surface of the planet.