Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have made the first ever global assessment map of how future climate and land-use change impacts genetic diversity in mammals.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have made the first ever global assessment map of how future climate and land-use change impacts genetic diversity in mammals. The researchers hope the map will assist policy makers in prioritizing which areas should be preserved first.
Over the last 200 years, researchers have worked towards understanding the global distribution of species and ecosystems. But so far even the basic knowledge on the global geography of genetic diversity was limited.
That now changes with a recent paper from Globe Institute. Professor David Nogues Bravo and his team has spent the last eight years combining data from scientific gene banks with scenarios of future climate and land-use change. The result is the first ever global assessment of how it will impact the genetic diversity of mammals, e.g. when tropical forests are converted to agricultural land.
‘Our study identifies both genetically poor and highly diverse areas severely exposed to global change, paving the way to better estimate the vulnerability to global change such as rise in temperature as well as land-use changes. It could help countries to find out how much of the genetic diversity in their own country may be exposed to different global change impacts, while also establishing priorities and conservation policies’, says David Nogues Bravo.
Read more at University of Copenhagen - The Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences
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