Direct and indirect effects of climate change on future forest biodiversity

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Rupert Seidl
• Subject Area: Forestry ; Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 568897612

Halting global biodiversity loss is a central challenge for humanity in the 21st century. On factor contributing to the ongoing loss of biodiversity is anthropogenic climate change. Climate change impacts biodiversity through direct effects, with climatic parameters influencing the life history of organisms. But also indirect effects exist, with climate change altering important habitat features, which in turn influence biodiversity. To date, the relative contributions of direct and indirect effects of climate change on biodiversity remain widely unclear. Furthermore, the potential of ecosystem management to moderate indirect climate change effects (e.g., by creating microclimatic refugia) remains poorly quantified. Focusing on forest ecosystems, our objective here is to disentangle the different pathways of climate influence on biodiversity, harnessing the extensive biodiversity data gathered in the Biodiversity Exploratories in a novel simulation framework. Our specific objectives are (i) to assess how strongly the microclimatic buffering under forest canopies influences diversity, (ii) to quantify how direct and indirect effects of climate change influence biodiversity throughout the 21st century, and (iii) to evaluate the potential of adaptive forest management measures to buffering indirect climate change effects on biodiversity. We focus on the diversity of plants, bryophytes, insects, bats and birds, using the wealth of data collected in the Biodiversity Exploratories to fit a suite of species distribution models. We subsequently link these models with a next-generation forest simulation framework, to dynamically assess the effects of changing climate and forest conditions on biodiversity. We investigate six future climate scenarios until 2100 and use a framework of counterfactual simulations to disentangle direct and indirect effects of climate change. We subsequently implement adaptive forest management measures in our simulation environment to quantify their ability to moderate indirect climate effects on biodiversity. The outcomes of the project contribute to a better understanding of how climate change impacts forest biodiversity, and provide insights of relevance for safeguarding biodiversity in ecosystem management.

• DFG Programme: Infrastructure Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1374: Biodiversity Exploratories