Fine-scale variation in projected climate change presents opportunities for biodiversity conservation in Europe

We use a multi-model ensemble of regional climate models to identify areas with significantly high and low climate stability persistent throughout the 21st century in Europe.

Here we present a set of raster files that contain discrete zones of climatic stability and instability, also referred to as hotspots and coldspots. Our analysis of future climatic stability was based on projected changes of nine climate variables selected to proxy key aspects of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics. The underlying climate projection, including different indices, are available at https://zenodo.org/record/3952159#.YNWN_OgzaUl. The cumulative change of all nine climate variables, termed Aggregate Climate Change (ACC), is used to identify regions of significantly higher or lower climatic stability (Getis-Ord Gi* p-value < 0.05) across Europe. We carry out this assessment at the continental and regional scales. While the continental assessment reports the large-scale latitudinal and orographic patterns of climatic stability, the regional assessment explores the residual ACC variation that remained after extracting the large-scale continental trend. The raster files present climatic features that were identified to persist in their location throughout the 21st century (i.e., in periods 2021-2040, 2041-2060, and 2061-2100) and were supported by a majority of climate projections considered in this study. Specifically, we considered five GCM-RCM pairs driven by two RCP scenarios, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. The targeted areas of climatic stability were required to be confirmed by four out of five climate models nested within each RCP, at least.

The used naming convention is as follows:

Scale – Global, Regional

Type of the zone – HotSpot (zone of significantly low climatic stability), ColdSpot (zone of significantly high climatic stability)

Driving RCP scenario – RCP45, RCP85

Raster files with RCP indicated in their name refer to either RCP4.5 or RCP8.5. These files contain two values referring to the presence (1) or absence (0) of climatic stability areas:

Global_HotSpots _RCP45

Global_ColdSpots _RCP45

Regional_HotSpots _RCP45

Regional_ColdSpots _RCP45

Global_HotSpots _RCP85

Global_ColdSpots _RCP85

Regional_HotSpots _RCP85

Regional_ColdSpots _RCP85

Raster files without RCP code in their name contain combinations of both RCPs. The cell values indicate absence (0), presence in RCP4.5 OR RCP8.5 (1), or presence in RCP4.5 AND RCP8.5 (2) of climatic stability areas:

Global_HotSpots

Global_ColdSpots

Regional_HotSpots

Regional_ColdSpots

The format of raster files is tiff. All data are in the GCS_WGS_1984 geographic coordinate system.