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These are the intended use-case/justification for one or multiple variable groups. Opportunities are linked to relevant experiment groups. Identifying opportunities helps to provide a structure to map variables against requirements. Each opportunity description will convey why this combination of variables and experiments is important and how they contribute to impact.
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| description | Advancing model-based impact assessments and adaptation planning in the terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services sector. This opportunity includes variable groups providing information needed for model-based impact assessments and adaptation planning in the terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services sector. The included variable groups will serve a broad range of biodiversity and ecosystem models relevant to IPBES. They cover the needs of a broad and important impact sector aiming to understand past biodiversity and ecosystem changes as well as projecting their future trends, in order to evaluate impacts, risks, and potential adaptations to safeguard biodiversity and ecosystem services and ensuring planetary health and human well-being. The opportunity and variable groups provide the minimum set of monthly variables essential for assessing broad-scale impacts of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services as well as advanced sets of variables with daily and sub-daily that are essential for process-based biodiversity models, forest models and biophysical models.The daily resolution is essential to make more robust predictions at the level of individual species and functional types, e.g. by assessing the impacts of extremes (e.g. aridity, extreme fire weather, frost days) on ecological life cycles as well as phenological changes. Biodiversity and ecosystem services are essential for ensuring planetary health and human wellbeing. The essential biodiversity variables (EBVs) cover multiple facets of biodiversity from the genes to ecosystem level (Pereira et al. 2013, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1229931). Modelling these EBVs and comparing outputs to observations requires high temporal resolution.Advanced, biophysical models for terrestrial biodiversity need input from physics-based microclimate models to calculate organism heat and water balance at high temporal resolution, and thus require a minimum set of hourly climate variables to calculate those energy balances. |
| desirable_ensemble_size | 1000 |
| expected_impacts | Climate impact assessments on terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services are supported and undertaken by a large and growing community of practice and this opportunity will directly contribute to the efforts of IPBES to improve understanding of biodiversity and ecosystem services changes and improve scenario work. The variable group “biodiv\_land\_monthly” covers typical input needed for coarse-scale biodiversity and ecosystem services models as summarised in the BES-SIM protocols (Kim et al. 2018, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-4537-2018; Pereira et al. 2024, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adn3441). Additionally, these variables can be used to conduct impact assessments for different ecological groups and realms as e.g. in Hof et al. (2018, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1807745115) and Zurell et al. (2018, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0312-9). The variable group “biodiv\_land\_daily” provides input variables needed for advanced process-explicit and statistical biodiversity models and process-based forest models. These span models for predicting spatiotemporal distribution and abundances of species or functional types, to models of avian species migration pathways and disease spread. The variable group thus supports a broad set of use cases for model the positive and negative contribution of Nature to people. The variable group “biodiv\_land\_daily\_advanced” provides additional input for process-based forest models. Forests provide many essential ecosystem services to people, mitigate climate change impacts, and suffer from a mix of synergistic global change effects such as climate extremes and climate-induced spread of diseases. The variable group supports advanced process-based forest models through provision of variables related to extreme disturbances. The variable group “biodiv\_microclim\_hourly” serve as input to biophysical models that help to understand and predict climate change impacts on species' behaviour, phenology, survival, distribution, and abundance. The variables in this variable group constitute typical input needed for microclimate and biophysical models. Biophysical models are uniquely suited to solve global change biology problems that involve predicting and interpreting responses to environmental variability and extremes, multiple or shifting constraints, and novel abiotic or biotic environments (Briscoe et al. 2023, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16557). |
| justification_of_resources | Understanding past and projecting future trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services is essential for assessing impacts, risks, potential adaptation and migration measures, and ensuring planetary health and human well-being. Impacts to biodiversity is a major concern in the regulated financial sector. Quantification of bioclimatic variables and metrics in a comprehensive and standardized framework from the climate community would be a significant step forward in addressing biodiversity. This request covers several variable groups that are essential inputs to a range of biodiversity and ecosystem services models with varying degree of process detail. These span a minimum set of monthly variables that are absolutely essential for assessing broad-scale impacts of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services, daily variables that will facilitate the use of process-based models to simulate different biodiversity facets and essential biodiversity variables as well as long-term forest dynamics, and hourly variables that will facilitate the use of biophysical models. These models and thus this opportunity will directly contribute to the efforts of IPBES to improve understanding of biodiversity and ecosystem services changes and improve scenario work. |
| lead_theme | Impacts & Adaptation |
| minimum_ensemble_size | 1 |
| name | Terrestrial Biodiversity |
| opportunity_id | 11 |
| technical_notes | The time frame is from past (pre-industrial) to future. We don't need DECK. but historial and piControl sounds sensible for attribution studies. Opportunity 3 merged into this had a timeslice note: historical (full record or time slice, e.g., hist20 or updated hist36/hist46) and pi-control time slice (e.g., picontrol050) Time slices apply to all experiments within this opportunity that output data within the time slice period: hist20 to scenario20start as priority 1 (high) hist43 to scenario30start as priority 2 (medium) hist72 to scenario50start as priority 3 (low) |
| data_request_themes | Impacts & Adaptation |
| experiment_groups | picontrol, conc-driven-scenario-extensions, highresmip2-ia, scenarios, historical |
| mips | PMIP |
| time_subsets | 80ac3156-a698-11ef-914a-613c0433d878 |
| variable_groups | biodiv_land_daily, biodiv_land_daily_advanced, biodiv_land_monthly, biodiv_microclim_hourly |