The road to integrate climate change projections with regional land-use–biodiversity models

Current approaches to project spatial biodiversity responses to climate change mainly focus on the direct effects of climate on species while regarding land use and land cover as constant or prescribed by global land-use scenarios. However, local land-use decisions are often affected by climate change and biodiversity on top of socioeconomic and policy drivers. To realistically understand and predict climate impacts on biodiversity, it is, therefore, necessary to integrate both direct and indirect effects (via climate-driven land-use change) of climate change on biodiversity. In this perspective paper, we outline how biodiversity models could be better integrated with regional, climate-driven land-use models. We initially provide a short, non-exhaustive review of empirical and modelling approaches to land-use and land-cover change (LU) and biodiversity (BD) change at regional scales, which forms the base for our perspective about improved integration of LU and BD models. We consider a diversity of approaches, with a special emphasis on mechanistic models. We also look at current levels of integration and at model properties, such as scales, inputs and outputs, to further identify integration challenges and opportunities. We find that LU integration in BD models is more frequent than the other way around and has been achieved at different levels: from overlapping predictions to simultaneously coupled simulations (i.e. bidirectional effects). Of the integrated LU-BD socio-ecological models, some studies included climate change effects on LU, but the relative contribution of direct vs. indirect effects of climate change on BD remains a key research challenge. Important research avenues include concerted efforts in harmonizing spatial and temporal resolution, disentangling direct and indirect effects of climate change on biodiversity, explicitly accounting for bidirectional feedbacks, and ultimately feeding socio-ecological systems back into climate predictions. These avenues can be navigated by matching models, plugins for format and resolution conversion, and increasing the land-use forecast horizon with adequate uncertainty. Recent developments of coupled models show that such integration is achievable and can lead to novel insights into climate–land use–biodiversity relations. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.