Post Doc USGS Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, United States
East Africa faces increasing warming, evapotranspiration, climate variability, and extreme weather events. In Tanzania, climate change and climate adaptation efforts have mainly focused on human livelihoods, agriculture, or socioecological consequences. Much less attention is directed toward understanding the impacts of climate change on biodiversity or ways to enable species to adapt to it. Here we use SDMs to help identify Climate Change Refugia for Tanzania government agencies and non-profit stakeholders. In addition to the challenges of working internationally with many stakeholders with divergent needs, producing Climate Change Refugia maps in Tanzania has methodological quandaries. Our stakeholders' priority species include those that participate in the largest overland animal migration in the world and long-lived species ( elephants and chimpanzees) with lifespans that exceed the time frame for our future climate change projections. Many target species have flexible behaviors that may allow them to adapt to new conditions (i.e., increase nocturnality) in ways not captured by our models. We have almost no fine-scale environmental data and incomplete knowledge of how biotic interactions will impact future distributions of species. Preliminary results indicate Tanzania will experience a heterogenetic response to climate change. Forest habitats in western Tanzania will decrease for primates (Cercopithecus mitis). Grassland habitats in the north will become unsuitable for grassland birds (Sagittarius serpentarius). The southern Eastern Arc mountains will receive more rain. These mountains served as climate refugia in the Pleistocene and are home to many endemic reptiles, amphibians, and birds. The Eastern Arc mountains may provide cooler, moist refugia at their peaks during this period of anthropogenic climate change. Wildlife corridors are being established at the national level, but if these corridors have intolerable climate conditions (now or in the near future), species will not use them to migrate to climatic refugia. One of our goals is to examine the climate future of the wildlife corridors to see if they will remain suitable habitats and thus effective pathways to refugia.
