Climate vulnerability of Earth's terrestrial biomes.

ABSTRACT: Climate-smart restoration and sustainable ecosystem management requires understanding which plant species will survive and thrive under both current and future climate conditions. Changing climate conditions are expected to place new environmental stresses on plants across biomes, potentially shifting the climate envelope, with unexpected consequences for ecological communities. Here, we train machine learning models on the global distribution of Earth's biomes, demonstrating that soil and climate can accurately capture contemporary biome-climate envelopes (BCEs) with 90% accuracy. We then predict how changes in climate might alter BCEs under different climate change scenarios (RCP 4.5 and 8.5). We find that 11-17% of the terrestrial surface is likely to experience a change in BCE by 2080

SUBMITTER: Runge K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12475491 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature