Future scenarios for biodiversity

Helping to plan for the future by projecting likely outcomes for biodiversity under alternative scenarios of management actions and global change.

CSIRO’s biodiversity modelling infrastructure enables us to estimate the impacts of future management actions or global change drivers on biodiversity. The high spatial resolution of our analyses (30m regionally, 250m nationally, 1km globally) allows applications across multiple scales. Nationally we have worked with Australia’s Federal Government in assessing the impact of global change on the national protected area system and undertaken research to identify ‘climate change refugia‘ for Australia’s biodiversity. Globally, we are partnering with international collaborators to assess biodiversity under future scenarios of alternative socio-economic development pathways, as part of an international modelling effort to inform the IPBES global assessment. We have also pioneered the development of semi-mechanistic metacommunity models, to incorporate key ecological processes (dispersal, community assembly, genetic adaptation) into projections of biodiversity change under a warming climate and alternative adaptive management strategies.