Modeling Impacts of Climate Change on Mangroves Worldwide

Given the multitude of ecosystem services provided by mangroves, it is
important to understand their potential responses to global climate change.
Extensive reviews of the literature and manipulative experiments suggest that
mangroves will be impacted by climate change, but few studies have tested these
predictions over large scales using statistical models. We provide the first
example of applying species and community distribution models (SDMs and CDMs,
respectively) to coastal mangroves worldwide. Species projected to shift their
ranges polewards by at least 2 degrees of latitude consistently experience a
decrease in the amount of suitable coastal area available to them. Central
America and the Caribbean are forecast to lose more mangrove species than other
parts of the world. We found that the extent and grain size, at which continuous
CDM outputs are examined, independent of the grain size at which the models
operate, can dramatically influence the number of pseudo-absences needed for
optimal parameterization. The SDMs and CDMs presented here provide a first
approximation of how mangroves will respond to climate change given simple
correlative relationships between occurrence records and environmental data.
Additional, precise georeferenced data on mangrove localities and concerted
efforts to collect data on ecological processes across large-scale climatic
gradients will enable future research to improve upon these correlative
models.