On Thursday, January 10, the lecture “Bioextremes: nuevas variables climáticas en formato GIS para trabajar en macroecologia y cambio global” took place, delivered by Sara Varela, postdoctoral researcher at the Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin).
Predictions of temperature, precipitation, salinity, and other values produced by climate models allow the construction of ad hoc variables to understand the consequences of climate change on biodiversity. The BioExtremes project aims to generate a new set of climate variables in GIS format related to the intensity and duration of “extreme” events (e.g., the number of consecutive days with temperatures below zero, or the number of consecutive days with temperatures above 25ºC). These variables can then be used to build species distribution models to generate improved maps of species distributions in the future.
During the lecture, Sara Varela presented the BioExtremes and EcoClimate projects, focusing on the climate models available to predict both past and future climate, and the types of variables these models provide. The main objective of the lecture was to foster a discussion with the attending researchers to identify variables of interest and debate what types of climate layers could be developed to improve models and expand their usefulness.
The lecture took place in the ECIMAT Assembly Hall from 11 to 11:30, was broadcast live at http://tv.uvigo.es/es/directo/1.html, and is available on UVigoTV.
