Future of biodiversity in the Barents Region

The climate is changing rapidly, affecting the distribution and abundance of numerous species. If we want to be able to preserve our biodiversity it is paramount that we obtain more knowledge about how climate change may affect the species currently inhabiting the Barents region and the species that may in future establish themselves in the region. A project to obtain this knowledge was therefore set up at the Landscape Ecology group of the Department of Ecology and Environmental Science of Umeå University.

The project was mostly conducted by Anouschka Hof, assisted by Roland Jansson and coordinated by Christer Nilsson and funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers.

The general aim of this project was to assess how climate change may affect the geographic distribution of species and how the network of protected areas should look like in future to be able to safeguard the biodiversity in the Barents Region. We included approximately 500 species of amphibians, butterflies, birds, mammals, moths, plants, slugs, snails, and reptiles in our study and found that the general trend was that species richness may increase in the Barents region in future if species are able to disperse and fully utilize their future climatic niches. If species are not able to disperse beyond their current climatic niche but are able to maintain in the areas they occupy at present, species richness will however decrease in future.

It is therefore important to consider increasing the network of protected areas to maintain or create possible dispersal routes. Cold-climate specialists are vulnerable and may even go extinct locally. Possible negative effects of indirect impacts of climate change, such as increased competition and predation, are thought to present greater challenges to these cold-climate specialists. These affects should therefore not be neglected. Areas that need that need to be prioritized when increasing the network of protected areas are located in the coastal areas of Fennoscandia and in the south-western parts of Northwest Russia. These areas are going to be climatologically increasingly suitable for a large range of species. However, these areas also have the highest human activity and political and socio-economic issues may undermine choosing the areas that are predicted to have the highest biodiversity. Organizational, social, economic and logistical factors may overrun ecological choices in practice and although the cost component in conservation priority setting is often neglected resources are not endless.

More detailed studies focusing on particular species in combination with assessments of what is possible economically, politically, logistically and socially is necessary to optimize conservation.