Interacting effects of land-use and climate change on biodiversity

Climate and land-use change represent serious threats to biodiversity.

However, a past lack of land-use change data over large spatio-temporal scales means that their interactive effects have rarely been quantified, despite the importance of habitat for dispersal and persistence, and the role of land use in determining microclimatic variability.

To address this, this project will analyse historical (>50-year), recent (20-year) and modern land-use data over a long gradient of land-use and climate change covering Sweden and Great Britain, together with long-term records of plants, butterflies and birds.

First, we will assess community level change in the form of species richness, biotic homogenisation (increasing community similarity) and community responses to climate change.

Next, we will look at how the colonisation, persistence and local extinction of species from individual landscapes translates into larger-scale distributional changes following climate and land-use change.

Multiple time steps and taxonomic groups will provide insights about the varying rates of species and community responses, as well as identifying shifts in the relative effects of global change drivers over time.

Countries with contrasting land-use histories will allow us to accurately partition the interactive effects of climate and land-use change.

Our results will be highly important in the field of global change, also informing conservation strategies and predictions of future ecological change.