Are protected areas enough to conserve terrestrial biodiversity in a 2050 climate?

Andy Jarvis, Julian Ramirez, Luigi Guarino, Reymondin, Hector Tobón, Daniel Amariles

We’re still not doing enough to convince people

of the seriousness

Contents

• The boring bit – data quality• The fun bit – modelling• Our current coverage of protected areas – pretty

good!• The bad news• What to do? An example in agrobiodiversity• The next steps• The Peter Jones Scholarship for Agricultural

Informatics

The Wallace Initiative framework:

1. Assessment of impacts of climate change on species distributions to:

– Determine refugia– Improve knowledge of risks of exceeding certain levels of

change by means of determining extinction rates2. Map potential corridors for species3. Potential refugia, carbon, and design of REDD

mechanisms4. Driving of protected area design in the 21st century5. Provide information to aid the development of

adaptation plans

The Boring Bit – Data Quality

The GBIF database: status of the data

• The database holds 177,887,193 occurrences• Plantae occurrences are 44,706,505 (25,13%) • 33,340,000 (74.5%) have coordinates• How many of them are correct, and reliable?• How many new georreferences could we get?

CURRENT STATUS OFTHE Plantae RECORDS

The GBIF database: status of the data

• How to make the data reliable enough?– Verify coordinates at different levels

• Are the records where they say they are?• Are the records inside land areas (for terrestrial plant

species only)• Are all the records within the environmental niche of the

taxon?• Sea records: not verifiable

– Correct wrong references– Add references to those that do not have– Cross-check with curators and feedback the database

The GBIF database: status of the data

• How to make that possible?– Java-based scripts– Spatial datasets: environmental descriptors,

administrative boundaries, high resolution land area mask

– Some processing power– Enough storage– And… most important: Java geeks!

• Using a random sample of 950.000 occurrences with coordinates

• Are the records where they say they are?: country-level verification

Records mostly locatedin country boundaries Inaccuracies in

coordinates

What on earth is this?

Records with null country: 58.051 6,11% of total Records with incorrect country: 6.918 0,72% of totalTotal excluded by country 64.969 6,83% of total

• Are the terrestrial plant species in land?: Coastal verification

Errors, and more errors

Records in the ocean: 9.866 1,03% of total Records near land (range 5km): 34.347 3,61% of totalRecords outside of mask: 369 0,04% of totalTotal excluded by mask 44.582 4.69% of total

Not so bad at all… stats

• 44’706.505 plant records• 33’340.008 (74,57%) with coordinates• From those

– 88.5% are geographically correct at two levels– 6.8% have null or incorrect country (incl. sea plant

species)– 4.7% are near the coasts but not in-land

Summary of errors or misrepresented data

TOTAL EVALUATED RECORDS: 950.000

Good records: 840.449 88.47% of total

RESULTING DATABASE

Next steps• It now takes 27 minutes to verify 950,000 records,

177million would be 83 hours (3 ½ days)• Identify terrestrial plant species and separate them from

sea species• Sea species not verifiable• Use a georreferencing algorithm to:

– Correct wrong references– Incorporate new location data to those with NULL lat,lon

• Interpret 2nd & 3rd-level administrative boundaries and use them too

• Implement environmental cross-checking (outliers)

So what do we face in terms of biodiversity distribution in 2050?

The current situation

• Covering 13.8% of the total global surface (3.8% international, 10% national)

Results: protected areas per region

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Maximum hotspot overall

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Average representativeness

UK

World

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South AfricaNorth Africa

Middle eastSaudi Arabia

West Africa

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Current extent of in situ conservation

Global biodiversity currently well conserved

The data: current and future climates

• Current climates from WorldClim– 19 bioclimatic indices at 10 arc-minutes

• Future climates from downscaled GCM outputs– 18 models at 10 arc-minutes spatial resolution– For 2050s– Under the A2a emission scenario– 19 bioclimatic variables as for WorldClim– Control run with the average climate of all GCMs

The approach• Maximum entropy as a very accurate algorithm for niche

modeling• 10 or more points for each of the 33,004 taxa• Current: two extreme migration scenarios

– Unlimited migration– Null migration

• Measures of diversity and area loss– Per region and globally

• Within Protected Areas• Overall

Modeling approach• Aplying the maximum entropy algorithm

– Macoubea guianensis Aubl.: food for rural indigenous communities in the Amazon

Data harvesting from GBIF Building the presence model Projecting on future climates

NULL MIGRATION

UNLIMITEDMIGRATION

Potential habitatexpansion

NULL MIGRATION UNLIMITED MIGRATION

CURRENT

Results: Current and future predicted species richness

• Important hotspots in Latin America, Europe, Australasia and Central Africa

• Displacement and loss of niches

NULL MIGRATIONUNLIMITED MIGRATION

Results: changes in species richness

• Null migration: losses everywhere• Unlimited migration: mostly displacement

Results: changes within regions

• Changes in species richness under both migration scenarios

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Null migration

Unlimited migration

Results: in situ conservation under the context of CC

• No matter if the best ‘adaptation’ scenario (unlimited dispersal) is chosen, negatives are expected in most regions

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Percent of area with loss within PAs [UM]

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Results: in situ conservation under the context of CC

• Expected changes within protected areas (PAs) sometimes occur at a greater extent than non-protected areas

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NULL MIGRATION

UNLIMITED MIGRATION

Our protected areas not prepared to conserve biodiversity in 2050

CC on top of ongoing processes: habitat degradation

• Land use change monitoring model

• Occurrences from the GBIF database

• Protected areas

MEASUREMENTS BETWEEN 2004-2009…

Caqueta, Jan 2004 – May 2009Date

Threats to biodiversity from habitat degradation

• From 12,853,796 records (60,894 taxa)– 315,590 records (2.5%) from 13,250 taxa (21.76%)

can be found in the Amazon• At least one population from 1,662 taxa (12.5%) is now

extinct due to land use changes• 3.9% taxa have more than 5% of their populations now

extinct• 1.3% have more than 10% and… 0.4% have more than

20%

ESTIMATIONS FROM 2004 to mid-2009… in only five and a half years, some 2.5% of the global biodiversity is under threat at different levels… only taking into account LUC

79.7%

18.0%

2.3%

Taxa outside the Amazon Taxa in degraded lands

Taxa outside degraded lands

In situ conclusions• Protected areas function today, at least on paper• Under a changed climate however, they do not effectively

conserve biodiversity, even assuming unlimited migration• In situ conservation needs to be oriented under the

context of climate change– Areas to be strengthened (more control)– Areas to be expanded– Areas to be re-located (if migration does occur)

• Enabling migration is critical: corridors of protected status help

• Redesigned functional landscapes also essential: Eco-efficient agriculture

Next steps… scientific rigor

• A far more detailed approach is required including– Individual GCM results– Other emission and policy scenarios– All GBIF species with more taxonomic and georreferencing

corrections– Other time slices: 2020s, 2030s, 2040s…– Validation metrics of Maxent models– Intermediate migration scenarios– Measure the number of extinct species for each region– Dealing with bias in the data. Sorry France.

– When each of the specimens die?– How much does each specimen need to move to

survive?

Modelling migration

Pathways to adaptation in agrobiodiversity

Florunner, with no root-knot nematode resistance

COAN, with population density of root-knot nematodes >90% less than in Florunner

Wild relative species

A. batizocoi - 12 germplasm accessions

A. cardenasii - 17 germplasm accessions

A. diogoi - 5 germplasm accessions

The solution and the problem

SpeciesChange in area

of distribution (%)Predicted state

in 2055

batizocoi -100 Extinctcardenasii -100 Extinctcorrentina -100 Extinctdecora -100 Extinctdiogoi -100 Extinctduranensis -91 Threatenedglandulifera -17 Stablehelodes -100 Extincthoehnii -100 Extinctkempff-mercadoi -69 Near-Threatenedkuhlmannii -100 Extinctmagna -100 Extinctmicrosperma -100 Extinctpalustris -100 Extinctpraecox -100 Extinctstenosperma -86 Threatenedvillosa -51 Near-Threatened

Impact of Climate Change – Wild Peanuts

Massive loss of agrobiodiversity

• FAO (1998) estimates that since the beginning of this century, about 75% of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost.

• In China, for example, nearly 10,000 wheat varieties were cultivated in 1949. By the 1970s, only about 1,000 varieties were still in use (FAO 1996).

• In Mexico, only 20% of the maize varieties reported in 1930 are now known in the country (FAO 1996).

• In Germany about half of the plant species in pastures have been lost (Isselstein 2003)

• In south Italy about 75% of crop varieties have disappeared (Hammer et al. 2003).

Gap Analysis: Strategies to fill the holes in our

seed collections

HERBARIUM GERMPLASM

NOGERMPLASM

DEFICIENTGERMPLASM

POTENTIALRICHNESS

RAREENVIRONMENTS

Wild Vigna collecting priorities

• Spatial analysis on current conserved materials

• *Gaps* in current collections

• Definition and prioritisation of collecting areas

• 8 100x100km cells to complete collections of 23 wild Vigna priority species

Richness in collecting zones at species level

Richness in collecting zones at genepool level

What the data says

• Our protected areas work today, not tomorrow• Do we conserve 20% of the land mass, or do we

need a new conservation paradigm?• The solutions for agricultural biodiversity are

actually more simple. But what about the useless species? ;-)

• We need to reconstruct our landscapes to function as protected areas -> Eco-efficient agriculture

The Final Word

Silvia Elena Castaño Enna Diaz Betancourt

Juan Carlos Andrade

Simone Staiger Ana Milena Guerrero Glenn Graham Hyman

Anton Eitzineger

Lilian Patricia Torres

Carlos Nagles Jorge Cardona

Simon Cook

The Oldies

Andy Jarvis

Natalia Uribe Robert AndradeJulián Ramirez

Daniel Jimenez Vanesa Herrera

Nora Castañeda

Mike Salazar

Jhon Ocampo

Hector Favio Tobón

The Youth

Louis Reymondin

Ovidio RiveraElizabeth Barona

Katherin Tehelen

Victor Augusto Lizcano Angelica Ma. Henao Carolina Argote D.

Daniel Amariles

Oriana Carolina Ovalle

And the positively under-age

Emmanuel Zapata

The Peter Jones Scholarship for Agricultural Informatics

a.jarvis@cgiar.org