What is it about?
The trait‐based vulnerability assessment (TVA) protocol is being increasingly used to assess climate‐change impacts to a diversity of taxa, as it requires fewer data compared to niche and mechanistic models. However, uncertainty in TVA results remains unevaluated. We present the first quantitative investigation of the impacts of uncertainty on TVA, using global freshwater crayfish (574 species) as a representative data‐poor taxon.
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Why is it important?
We show that the number (79–156) and identity of vulnerable species can vary depending on which climate scenario was selected. Ensemble means of climate models identified fewer vulnerable species, potentially softening the extremes of individual climate models.
Perspectives
We show that assessors applyingtrait‐based vulnerability assessment protocol across taxa and geographical scales should use ecological thresholds for quantitative traits, where possible and importantly perform sensitivity analyses, including critically assessing assumptions and correlations underpinning the selection of traits in different dimensions; and capturing variability among climate‐change models.
Mr Md Anwar Hossain
University of Melbourne
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Assessing the impacts of uncertainty in climate‐change vulnerability assessments, Diversity and Distributions, May 2019, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/ddi.12936.
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