Assessing ecosystem vulnerability under severe uncertainty of global climate change.

ABSTRACT: Assessing the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of species, communities, and ecosystems is essential for successful conservation. Climate change, however, induces extreme uncertainty in various pathways of assessments, which hampers robust decision-making for conservation. Here, we developed a framework that allows us to quantify the level of acceptable uncertainty as a metric of ecosystem robustness, considering the uncertainty due to climate change. Under the framework, utilizing a key concept from info-gap decision theory, vulnerability is measured as the inverse of maximum acceptable uncertainty to fulfill the minimum required goal for conservation. We applied the framework to 42 natural forest ecosystems and assessed their acceptable uncertainties in terms of maintenance of species

SUBMITTER: Yoshikawa T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10097691 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature