The Future Impacts of Climate Change on the North American Flora.

The fingerprint of global climate change on biodiversity has been well documented. In particular, over the last century, historical data has reveal significant changes in the range size of hundreds of plants and animals. These changes include poleward expansions, southerly extirpations, range contractions, and upward shifts in elevation. In turn, these changes in range size have been linked to the disruption of established communities and increased risk of extinction, contributing to the global extinction crisis. How climate change will impact future species loss, however, remains poorly understood. One particularly powerful method for assessing species response to future climate change is the application of environmental niche models (ENM). Environmental niche models incorporate current climatic, geological, and environmental data to characterize the spatial distribution of suitable habitat for a given species, which can then be projected onto future climate scenarios to assess changes in the availability and spatial distribution of suitable habitat. The recent availability of large-scale species distribution datasets and advancements in computational capabilities have made it possible to employ ENMs for thousands of species. Here, I discuss our efforts to use the ENM approach to characterize the future distribution of ~11,000 North American vascular plant species. We utilize these projections to identify what species will be at increased extinction risk and what species may pose future invasive threats, based on changes in the availability of suitable habitat. Furthermore, we explore how these loses and gains will effect regional patterns of biodiversity, as well as, phylogenetic diversity.  Finally, we use these projections to characterize the directionality of species’ range shifts, which, when combined with land-use data, can provide insight into areas of future conservational interest and potential migratory corridors.