The rationale.

Climate change, habitat degradation, overexploitation, and biological invasions are among the major threats to global biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. These threats are leading to the loss of species and altered energy flows, which can have severe impacts on human health, wellbeing, and economic activities. Current efforts to halt the biodiversity crisis are falling short, highlighting the urgency for policy-relevant research that quantifies the effect of anthropogenic impacts under contrasting scenarios to inform citizens, managers, and policymakers on the best strategies for protecting, conserving, and managing biodiversity. Our team is devoted to developing the necessary tools and providing the relevant information for evidence-based, long-term proactive actions to protect our planet's biodiversity and ecosystems.

The central question.

Our central question is “what are the consequences of anthropogenic impacts to global biodiversity and ecosystem functioning?”. In particular we aim to:
understand the underlying mechanisms driving the global distribution of biodiversity;
project the consequences of anthropogenic impacts to the distribution of biodiversity, in particular those associated with global climate change under contrasting scenarios (e.g., Paris Agreement expectations vs. reduced mitigation strategies);
identify priority conservation areas to safeguard biodiversity for future generations (e.g., climatic refugia) to inform global conservation and management strategies.

  • Featured projects
High-performance computing projects climate change impacts on biodiversity

Experiments will identify regions of extinction, persistence and ocean-accessible, climatic corridors for biodiversity.

Marine Protected Areas Europe

MPA Europe will map the optimal locations for marine protected areas in European seas.

Paris Agreement and the redistribution of biodiversity

A project aiming to answer the central question of what will be the consequences of future climate changes to global marine biodiversity.

Bio-ORACLE, data layers for distribution modelling

Bio-ORACLE is a project aimed to provide high-resolution geophysical, biotic and environmental data for distribution modelling.

biodiversityDS.

Jorge Assis [PhD, Associate Researcher]
Centre of Marine Sciences, University of Algarve [Faro, Portugal]
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