Methodology
Ecosystem resilience is addressed by focusing on the capacity of ecosystems to retain biological diversity in the face of ongoing, and uncertain, climate change. The approach uses existing global modelling of spatial turnover in species composition within three broad biological groups (plants, invertebrates and vertebrates) to scale projected changes in composition under a plausible range of climate scenarios. These projections serve as filters through which to analyse the configuration of habitat observed for a particular year (past to present) – represented as a grid in which cells have been scored in terms of habitat condition. The BERI is then calculated, for each cell in this grid, as a function of the connectedness of that cell to areas of natural habitat in the surrounding landscape which are projected to support a similar composition of species under climate change to that currently associated with the focal cell. Results can then be aggregated to report on status and trends for any desired set of reporting units – e.g. ecoregions, countries, or ecosystem types. This framework is underpinned by global models of spatial turnover in species composition previously established as part of CSIRO’s Biogeographic modelling Infrastructure for Large-scale Biodiversity Indicators (BILBI; Hoskins et al. 2018). These correlative models predict the compositional turnover (also known as “compositional dissimilarity” or “pairwise beta diversity”) expected between any two grid-cells on the planet as a function of fine-scaled spatial variation in climate, terrain and soils within major biomes and biogeographic realms. The models were fitted to best-available occurrence records for large numbers of species, and best-available environmental surfaces, using generalised dissimilarity modelling. Nonlinear functions generated by this model-fitting process describe the relative importance of different environmental gradients in driving spatial turnover in species composition, and how rates of turnover vary between different positions along each of these gradients.
Data description
Global 30-arcsecond (approximately 1km) gridded environmental surfaces for: Min Monthly Min Temperature, Max Monthly Max Temperature, Max Diurnal Temperature Range, Annual Precipitation, Actual Evaporation, Potential Evaporation, Min Monthly Water Deficit, Max Monthly Water Deficit, Soil pH, Soil Clay Proportion, Soil Silt Proportion, Soil Bulk Density, Soil Depth, Ruggedness Index, Topographic Wetness Index. Global occurrence records for all terrestrial species within the following taxa: vascular plants, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, ants, bees, beetles, bugs, butterflies, centipedes, dragonflies, flies, grasshoppers, millipedes, snails, moths, spiders, termites, wasps, are extracted from the GBIF
Indicator
Number of visits
Method / tool
Toolkit for Ecosystem Service SiteBased Assessment (TESSA)