The Reduced Effectiveness of Protected Areas under Climate Change Threatens Atlantic Forest Tiger Moths

Abstract

Climate change leads to species' range shifts, which may end up reducing the effectiveness of protected areas. These deleterious changes in biodiversity may become amplified if they include functionally important species, such as herbivores or pollinators. We evaluated how effective protected areas in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest are in maintaining the diversity of tiger moths (Arctiinae) under climate change. Specifically, we assessed whether protected areas will gain or lose species under climate change and mapped their locations in the Atlantic Forest, in order to assess potential spatial patterns of protected areas that will gain or lose species richness. Comparisons were completed using modeled species occurrence data based on the current and projected climate in 2080. We also built a null model for random allocation of protected areas to identify where reductions in species richness will be more severe than expected. We employed several modern techniques for modeling species' distributions and summarized results using ensembles of models. Our models indicate areas of high species richness in the central and southern regions of the Atlantic Forest both for now and the future. However, we estimate that in 2080 these regions should become climatically unsuitable, decreasing the species' distribution area. Around 4% of species were predicted to become extinct, some of them being endemic to the biome. Estimates of species turnover from current to future climate tended to be high, but these findings are dependent on modeling methods. Our most important results show that only a few protected areas in the southern region of the biome would gain species. Protected areas in semideciduous forests in the western region of the biome would lose more species than expected by the null model employed. Hence, current protected areas are worse off, than just randomly selected areas, at protecting species in the future.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Brazilian Protected Areas Under Climate Change

“…Unfortunately, the current network of protected areas is inefficient to safeguard most species from these changes (Araujo et al, 2004;Ferro et al, 2014;Urbina-Cardona & Loyola, 2008), and our study does not show a more optimistic scenario for M. brasiliensis. Furthermore, most of the protected areas are fragmented (e.g., Sobral-Souza, Francini, & Lima-Ribeiro, 2015), as we observed here.…”

“…Coralsnakes (Family Elapidae) is a group particularly vulnerable to reduction in climatically suitable habitat due to its specialized habitat requirements and low dispersal abilities (Marques, Almeida-Santos, & Rodrigues, 2006), making it difficult for them to colonize suitable areas outside the existing range. Moreover, the high level of habitat fragmentation in tropical regions may impose additional restrictions for these species to colonize new areas, reducing their distribution to islands of natural areas embedded in a landscape of unsuitable habitats (Araujo, Cabeza, Thuiller, Hannah, & Williams, 2004;Ferro, Lemes, Melo, & Loyola, 2014). Within the coral snakes, the species Micrurus brasiliensis is probably highly susceptible to the combination of climate change and habitat fragmentation (Silva Jr., 2007).…”

Amphibian conservation, land-use changes and protected areas: A global overview

“…Finally, while considering future scenarios, it is important to highlight that our analyses consider only the current distributions of species; however, it is known that global climate change is already affecting biodiversity distribution patterns (Garcia et al, 2014). Hence, these changes might have a strong effect in the representativeness of PAs (Araujo et al, 2004;Ferro et al, 2014;Lemes et al, 2014;Loyola et al, 2014). Thus, ideally, the mentioned conservation planning protocols should incorporate the uncertainty associated with this particular threat in order to generate accurate and lasting policies.…”

Species conservation under future climate change: the case of Bombus bellicosus, a potentially threatened South American bumblebee species

“…Climate change in the next 50 years is pointed out as a major factor in forecasts of distribution range changes for Atlantic forest trees (Colombo and Joly 2010), amphibians (Lemes and Loyola 2013) and marsupials . For South American moths, climate change will force range shifts and reduce the conservation effectiveness of some protected areas, even leading 4 % of all analysed species to extinction (Ferro et al 2014). The bee fauna (bumblebees included) from this region, as they are also dependent on the same environmental variables, may also show similar patterns upon future climate change scenarios.…”

“…This leads us to question whether its disappearance in the northern limit of its distribution in southern Brazil was caused only by habitat loss or if climate change may have also played an important role in the species disappearance from its northernmost occurrence limit in Brazil. In South America, range shifts and species losses caused by climate change have been predicted for different groups: Atlantic forest trees (Colombo and Joly 2010), amphibians (Lemes and Loyola 2013), marsupials ) and moths (Ferro et al 2014).…”