Analysis of distribution and impact of climate change on medium and large mammals

Abstract

The scarcity of information and base level studies such as species surveys can lead to drastic consequences for biodiversity, affecting decision making, application and development of new research and the realization of new and complex questions that can further develop the study area. Without a summary of knowledge about a certain field, it is extremely complex to ask ecologically complex questions such as, for example, what will be the impact of climate change on mammals species, since it is necessary to have an accurate knowledge about the identity and distribution of species before developing a posteriori research and help develop the research in an area. Therefore, in this thesis we focused on resolving two knowledge gaps in mammal research: the state-of-the-art about papers and studies focusing on medium and large mammals on Cerrado and Atlantic Forest biomes, and future climate change impacts on these same species. In the first paper, we found that both the species richness and the number of papers were higher in the Atlantic Forest than in Cerrado, but there are still large sampling gaps, particularly in the Cerrado biome, showing the necessity of continuing the sampling efforts in the biomes, and to create and apply new and standardized sampling techniques because of the difficulties in comparing different studies. In the second chapter, we used the species list to model the impact caused by climate change in the future, in two distinct scenarios: an optimistic one with smaller changes in climate, and a pessimistic one with drastic variations. Our results show that areas with high species richness are concentrated in the southeast part of South America and will diminish in the future, with stronger impacts on the pessimistic scenarios, and these changes will be higher in forest-dependent mammal species. Our results show that severe climate change, on a small time scale, can lead to variation in mammal species distribution which can cause the loss of several ecosystem services in the South American environment.