Forest regeneration may reduce the negative impacts of climate change on the biodiversity of a tropical hotspot

Abstract

Aim: Evaluate how large-scale forest regeneration based on a low-cost restoration method may mitigate the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation associated to future climate changes on the distribution of birds and arboreal mammals in a tropical biodiversity hotspot; find areas with different current and future potential species richness and assess how passive restoration can reduce the risk of species extinction.Location: Brazilian Atlantic Forest (BAF). Methods: We built a forest regeneration scenario via a model of seed dispersal based on the potential movement of frugivorous fauna and projected the potential distribution of 356 bird species and 21 arboreal mammals based on Species Distribution Models (SDM) which employed 79,462 occurrence records and four algorithms for different climate and landscape scenarios. SDM were based on climate and landscape predictors separately and the results were combined into maps of species richness. Finally, we assessed the species' risk of extinction based on the species-area relationship.Results: Without considering the effects of climate change, the potential distribution area for each species increases on average by 72.5% (SD = 8%) in the scenario of potential regeneration. Climate change decreases the area of potential occurrence of 252 species, which may suffer a mean reduction of 74.4% (SD = 9.3%) in their current potential distribution areas. BAF regions with the largest amounts of forest had the greatest potential richness of species. In future climate scenario, 3.4% of species may become extinct, but we show that large-scale regeneration may prevent these extinctions.Main conclusions: Despite the possible negative impacts of climate change on the distribution of 67% of the studied species, which would increase the risk of species extinction, our analysis indicated that promoting large-scale BAF restoration based on natural regeneration may prevent biodiversity loss.

Climate change is expected to restructure forest frugivorous bird communities in a biodiversity hot‐point within the Atlantic Forest

“…Lower forest cover reduces the probability of occurrence of forest-dependent birds in the region (Morante-Filho et al, 2021) and is likely to intensify the loss of forest-dependent birds due to climate change. Indeed, it is expected that this worst scenario will not be exclusive for frugivorous birds, thus affecting the entire bird community along the CCAF, as shown by other studies performed in the biome (e.g., Loiselle et al, 2010;Tonetti et al, 2022;Vale et al, 2018).…”

The fate of vegetation remnants in the southern Amazon's largest threatened hotspot: part (I) a 33-year analysis of LULCC in the Tapajos River basin, Brazil

“…The basic procedures performed with this two software and the hexagon method used in the spatial analysis of the remnants are detailed in the articles (Ribeiro et al, 2009;Amaral et al, 2019). In addition, the details of computational operations and scripts generated in Python for Grass-GIS and LS-Metrics programs are explained in the works of Niebuhr (2018), Niebuhr et al (2020), andTonetti et al (2022) and publicly available at the link: <https://github.com/LEEClab/LS_METRICS>. Newer versions of Grass-GIS, v.7.2.2, had incompatibilities with LS-Metrics algorithm base -v. 1.0, so we advised those interested in using up to version 7.2.2 of Grass-Gis.…”

New progress in exploring the mechanisms underlying extraordinarily high biodiversity in global hotspots and their implications for conservation

“…For future conservation planning, Tonetti et al (2022) explored how large‐scale forest regeneration may reduce the negative impacts of climate change on the biodiversity of a tropical hotspot, Brazilian Atlantic Forest (BAF). They built a forest regeneration scenario via seed dispersal based on the potential dispersal of frugivorous fauna.…”

“…On a more positive note, this paper collection showed also that we have tools allowing detection of regions and refugia where much of biodiversity could be preserved (Doré et al, 2022; Liu et al, 2022). The available data and modern analytic tools have predictive power to plan efficient nature conservation (Doré et al, 2022; Shen et al, 2022; Su et al, 2022; Tonetti et al, 2022) and even the strategies how for mitigating biodiversity decline (Tonetti et al, 2022).…”