Quantifying the resilience of vertebrates to changing climates worldwide

Climate change remains one of the most critical issues facing global biodiversity and has already had a widespread negative impact on substantial numbers of terrestrial species. Despite these negative impacts, not all species are expected to respond equally to a changing climate.

Identifying species that are vulnerable to climate-induced population declines is therefore vital for conservation efforts.

Life history and demographic differences between taxa are a key candidate for explaining differences in these responses, but we currently lack a clear empirical link between demography and climate vulnerability across species.

The novel framework of demographic resilience provides a promising tool to predict how a species will respond to environmental change.

However, there is a desperate need to apply the population-resilience framework to recently developed datasets gathering demographic data and population changes for thousands of species.

In the current fellowship, using demographic and abundance data from vertebrates across the worlds ecosystems, I will develop quantitative tools to quantify which species are currently the most resilient to a changing climate.

To achieve this, I will address the following three broad research topics: 1) Quantify species-specific population responses to the climate anomalies and species-specific demographic resilience across the terrestrial vertebrates, 2) Assess whether demographic resilience predicts population-level responses to climate change, and 3) Infer taxonomic groups that are most vulnerable to a changing climate and use this information to improve conservation assessments.

This fellowship will bridge the gap between population demography and environmental change, improving our understanding of how human-induced climate change is reshaping the natural world.