Primatas da Mata Atlântica: mudanças climáticas, disponibilidade de hábitat e representação em unidades de conservação

Abstract

Climate-driven species redistribution threatens biodiversity across the globe. Understanding the mechanisms that influence the spatial rearrangement of species is important to estimate the consequences of the new species configuration on ecosystem functioning. It is also critical to understand how this spatial redistribution will affect the efficiency of protected areas in the future, since they are static elements in the landscape as opposed to weather conditions that change over time. Here, we modeled the current and future climatic suitability of primates from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest aiming to: i) investigate how climate change will influence the distribution of Atlantic Forest primates; ii) investigate the potential geographic changes in the different regions bordering the distributions of primate species in the Atlantic Forest in the face of climate change; and iii) assess the effects of climate change on the representativeness of primate species from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest in protected areas. Our results show that climate change expected by 2100 may: i) reduce the climatically suitable area for primate species in this biome; ii) provide contraction at the northern boundary of species distributions, indicating that the species distribution should shift southwards but without expanding the current southern boundaries; iii) reduce the proportion of species distributions represented in reserves in the biome, making the Brazilian national system of reserves inefficient in representing primates. There is an urgent need that the establishment of new protected areas, dispersal routes through ecological corridors and habitat restoration actions, be directed to areas with potential for climate suitability in the future.