High-resolution modelling of biodiversity under the shared socio-economic scenarios

Payal Bal, David Peter Wilkinson , Diego Arias Rodriguez, Roozbeh Valavi, Usha Nattala, William L Geary, Brendan Wintle

Impacts on biodiversity from global climate and land use change manifest through changes in habitat availability and suitability for species. We currently lack fine grain predictions about how species and their habitats respond at the local level to global drivers of change, particularly under future scenarios of coupled climate and land use change. Policies for biodiversity management often place an emphasis on management and protection of threatened and socially important species and their habitat. This requires modelling many species individually to inform national policy design and decisions. However, most multi-species modelling systems focus on the role of bioclimatic drivers of species distribution and abundance to the exclusion of the land use variables needed to understand and predict outcomes of socio-economic drivers of biodiversity change. We provide high-quality predictive species distribution models that capture the impacts of change in land use and other environmental drivers, and a comprehensive biodiversity dataset for Australia for thousands of species at high spatial resolution. We model the response of 1,488 species, including 592 birds, 254 mammals and 642 reptiles under coupled land-use (Shared Socioeconomic Pathways) and climate (Representative Concentration Pathways) scenarios. Our analyses present new possibilities for developing bespoke species-specific models when analysing many species at large spatial scales, that combine disciplinary ideas from data-science, high performance computing and species distribution modelling. Our assessment provides a new understanding of how projected socio-economic and climate scenarios play out for biodiversity.