ATLANTIC FOREST PRIMATES: CLIMATE CHANGE, HABITAT AVAILABILITY AND REPRESENTATION IN CONSERVATION UNITS
Threats to biodiversity; Change in distribution; Protected Areas; Conservation; Borderline.
The redistribution of species as measured by climate change endangers biodiversity. Understanding the mechanisms that influence the spatial rearrangement of species is important to estimate the consequences of the new configuration on ecosystem functioning. In addition, it is ideal to understand how this spatial redistribution will affect the efficiency of protected areas in the future, since they are static elements in the landscape, unlike climate conditions. Here, we model the current and future climate suitability of primates from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest aiming: i) investigate how climate change will influence the distributions of Atlantic Forest primates; ii) to investigate the potential geographic changes in the different bordering regions of the Atlantic Forest primate species distributions; and iii) to assess the effects of climate change on the representation of primate species from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest in conservation units. Our results showed that climate changes expected up to 2100 may: i) reduce the climatically suitable distribution area for primate species in the biome; ii) provide contraction of the northern limit of species distributions, indicating that the distribution of species should shift to the south, even if there is no shift of the southern limit; iii) reduce the level of protection of species in conservation units in the biome, making the national system of Brazilian conservation units more inefficient in protecting primates. If urgent measures to mitigate climate change and forest regeneration of this biome are not taken seriously, it is very likely that some primate species will become extinct.