CLAMBIO partners with local communities to develop climate mitigation strategies by integrating ecological and genomic data with climate models to understand past impacts and predict future habitat changes and species responses.
Read more about the project here
IN THE COMIC >
In Forest of Forgotten Futures, Yara has visions of the future biodiversity corridors and shares them with Leo. Together, they visit Indigenous communities in the Amazon and experience first-hand how the efforts of the past affect the present and how anything they do in the present will affect the future of the forests similar to how the studies in CLAMBIO will work hand-in-hand with the local people to create mitigation strategies.
They integrated data from geological sediment cores, species distributions, genomics, and community phylogenetics with climate models and environmental data to reconstruct the recent demographic history of populations in selected plant and animal groups, to infer how past climate changes have impacted habitat stability, dispersal, and local extinctions and to model how the distributions of suitable habitats may change in the future.
Climate change affects life at all levels, from genetic structure of animal and plant populations to the socio-economic organization of human communities, especially the indigenous peoples who depend on the forests for their livelihoods. Amazonia seems to be facing warmer and drier climates, which could make large areas unsuitable for species adapted to moist rainforest conditions and increase the susceptibility of vegetation to wildfires, thereby promoting savannization. This, in turn, would reduce biodiversity, biomass, carbon storage, and productivity of the forests, as well as further reduce local rainfall and affect river water levels through impacts on water circulation.
