Modelling climate change impacts on species’ distributions at the European scale: implications for conservation policy

The availability of suitable climate space across Europe for the distributions of 47 species chosen to encompass a range of taxa (including plants, insects, birds and mammals) and to reflect dominant and threatened species from 10 habitats was modelled for the current climate and three climate change scenarios using the SPECIES neural network model. The present European distribution was satisfactorily simulated for 45 species, which showed good statistics of fit between observed species’ distributions and derived models. The predicted responses to climate change demonstrate that the distribution of many species in Europe may be affected by climate change, but that the effects are likely to differ between species. The general pattern is of a south-west to north-east shift in suitable climate space, with gains balancing losses for many species. Based on the total change in potential climate space in Europe, the species most sensitive to climate change were Rubus chamaemorus (Cloudberry; negatively affected) and Genista acanthoclada (Hairy greenweed; positively affected). This disparity in species’ response has important implications for EU biodiversity policy as the significance of different countries changes in terms of their future contribution to the conservation of habitats and species.