UCSB Co-Principal
Investigator: Frank Davis
Funding agency:
California Energy Commission PIEREA (through Conservation International)
Project period:
April 2004 to March 2007
Project Summary
The
PIER Ecosystem Modeling Project
The PIER (California’s Public Interest
Energy Research Program; http://www.energy.ca.gov/pier/) ecosystem
modeling project, led by Conservation International, is a species-focused
approach to assessing the impacts of climate change on the biodiversity
of California. It is part of a broader effort of the Nature Conservancy/Conservation
International Joint Initiative on Climate Change and Conservation
to understand the impacts of climate change on ecosystems in California
and the Sonoran Desert. Project researchers are using niche models,
a landscape model called BioMove and fine-scale models to estimate
changes in species potential and realized niches under climate
change scenarios. The newest of these multiple modeling approaches,
the BioMove model, is currently under development by an international
team of researchers based in South Africa.
BioMove is a unique model of species' response
to climate change that will specifically address impacts on biodiversity.
The Global Change and Biodiversity Programme of the Kirstenbosch Research
Centre (South African National Biodiversity Institute - SANBI) has
produced this prototype model for assessment of climate change
effects on biodiversity hotspots, areas with high numbers of unique
species and high levels of threat, such as California. BioMove
represents individual species' responses to climate change in
concert with vegetation and land use factors. It has proved valuable
in helping to understand the impacts of climate change on natural
ecosystems in two biodiversity hotspots in South Africa.
The PIER project aims to improve BioMove
and to use it in conjunction with other models, both at coarser
(niche, DGVM) and finer (GAP, FATE) scales. This model ensemble
approach will be applied to endemic plants and plants of conservation
interest in California, which is also a biodiversity hotspot.
Because BioMove is based on basic biological principles, it may
be readily applied to any ecosystem, including California's. Because
it was designed to work in biodiversity hotspots, it is uniquely
suited to biodiversity impact assessment in California's highly
threatened and unique ecosystems. The data required to run the
model are available in California.
Project Goal
The goal of the project is model development
of BioMove to a fully operational, fully tested and parameterized
model for impact prediction in 6 target ecosystems in California,
and running BioMove in multi-model ensembles at varying scales.
The application of BioMove is focused on 4 ecoregions- the Mojave
Desert, the South and Central Coast regions, and the Sierra Nevada,
and a variety of vegetation types within them - to make the data
gathering required possible within the timeframe of this three-year
program. The end product of the project will be model code and
a user's manual, coupled with databases of input parameters suitable
for the full application of the model in a desktop computing format.
The completed model will have important theoretical and research
applications in addition to its primary application in impact
prediction. Running it in tandem with other types of models (niche,
GAP, dynamic vegetation) will yield additional insights into factors
operating at both larger and smaller scales. The end product of
the ensemble modeling of the project will be advanced impact assessment
of the effects of climate change on the vegetation of California.
Project Team
The international team brought together
to achieve this goal includes California gap analysis leader Frank
Davis (UC Santa Barbara), Ornithologist Terry Root (Stanford),
Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) innovator Ian Woodward,
of the University of Sheffield in the UK, gap model pioneer Hank
Shugart of the University of Virginia, international experts in
hybrid model development, including BioMove developer Guy Midgley
of the South African National Biodiversity Institute, and biogeographer Jim Thorne
(UC Davis). The team is led by the Principle Investigator, Dr.
Lee Hannah, a global authority on the impacts of climate change
on biodiversity hotspots, and a specialist in modeling climate
change impacts on species. The lead institutions are the Center
for Applied Biodiversity Science (CABS), which is the research
science arm of Conservation International, a non-profit biodiversity
conservation organization; and the South African National Biodiversity Institute.
Project Objectives
To achieve the project goal, the project
will pursue three major objectives:
1) model development of BioMove to a create
a complete hybrid modeling package capable of simulating both
species and vegetation responses, and their interaction, in multiple
California vegetation (ecosystem) types.
2) model parameterization for 4 ecoregions
(at least 6 vegetation types) in California, including plant-vertebrate
interactions for key species.
3) multi-model ensembles at multiple scales,
including niche modeling of select species statewide and GAP modeling
of competition at select locales.
Partnerships
This project is the first step in a joint
attempt by Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy
to understand the possible effects of climate change on biodiversity
in California and the Sonoran Desert of Mexico. We plan to work
closely with Craig Moritz at UC Berkeley, Terry Root at Stanford
and Frank Davis of UCSB. Project management is based at the Bren
School at UCSB. Managing PI for the project is Lee Hannah of Conservation
International, based at UCSB.