From Genes to Urban Areas: Applications of Spatial Modeling to Assess Climate Change Vulnerability in Natural and Built Systems

Over the last decade, ecology and related fields have benefited from explosive growth of spatially referenced biological and environmental data sets, including climate scenarios for the last 22,000 years to the late 21st century. At the same time, spatial modeling methods have been developed to combine these data to better understand and map drivers of biodiversity across space and through time. To date, most studies have considered species as the primary focus or response variable, but increasingly there is interest in modeling entities above and below the species level, most notably genomic variation within species and species assemblages. This talk will cover several recent studies on these themes, including (1) a project on methods for incorporating relevant population-level genetic variation into biogeographical models of species responses to climate change and (2) a model intercomparision study examining how climate novelty will degrade our ability to anticipate climate change impacts on natural systems. Lastly, I will discuss how methods developed in biogeography can be used to better communicate to the public the implications of climate change in urban areas.