Global Connectivity under different Climate and Land-use futures: A Predictive Framework for Biodiversity Conservation

Climate change is a major driver of biodiversity loss, altering species distributions and increasing extinction risk through shifts in suitable habitats and ecological interactions. Reliable predictions of these responses are essential for conservation planning, ecosystem service assessments, and climate adaptation strategies. Species distribution models (SDMs) project future species distributions by relating occurrence data to environmental predictors. Although SDMs increasingly include factors like topography, dispersal, productivity, and land use, climate-only modeling remains common for isolating climate effects. Here, we employ climate-based SDMs to predict species occurrence as climate conditions change, and integrate these results with land-use projections to evaluate how both climate and landscape suitability impact species distribution.

Maintaining interconnected landscapes is crucial for supporting ecological processes, including daily animal movements, dispersal from native habitats, gene flow, habitat recolonization, and range shifts driven by climate change. Because ecological processes and movement differ by species and type, determining priority areas for protection requires attention to specific connections, targeted processes, and relevant timescales. This study introduces a global predictive framework for terrestrial vertebrates that integrates changing climate and habitat suitability, and multi-directional connectivity under diverse socioeconomic-climate scenarios (SSP1-RCP2.6, SSP3-RCP7.0, and SSP5-RCP8.5).

Using Omniscape’s circuit-theory-based algorithm, we quantified normalized current flow for terrestrial vertebrates across historical (1981–2010) and future (2041–2070, 2071–2100) time periods. Our connectivity maps reveal areas where ecological flows are impeded, intensified, or channeled, enabling us to identify critical pinch-points whose loss could sever essential landscape connections. We aggregated species-level results to create global indicators, such as the Connectivity Change Index (Δ Normalized Current Flow), and identify hotspots where climate suitability may rise but connectivity declines, informing priorities for ecosystem protection (to maintain existing connectivity functions) or restoration (to create alternative routes and alleviate flow constrictions). Furthermore, this approach enables the integration of additional data to target habitats for species of concern.

By integrating climate, land use, and connectivity analyses at the global scale, our framework guides evidence-based, adaptive management strategies, highlighting regions where investment in ecological corridors and habitat restoration will most effectively conserve biodiversity amidst ongoing climate and land-use change.