DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13320276
title: Landscape resilience to climate change in Brazil

description: These files are the results of the project titled 'Mapping Areas Resilient to Climate Change in Brazilian Biomes', created through a partnership between the The Nature Conservancy Brasil, Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Universidade Federal de Jataí, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul, and Universidade Federal do ABC research institutions. A more detailed explanation of methods, application, and relevance can be found in the 2025 published paper, in the journal 'Global Change Biology' (https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.70544), and the supporting file for download.

 

Data information

The database consists of the mapping of terrestrial climate-resilient sites for biodiversity across Brazil. The most resilient sites in our results indicate areas that have high microclimatic diversity and that are connected, which are conditions necessary for species and ecological processes to persist under regional climate change. The data identifies sites with greater chances of providing suitable conditions for species to persist under regional climate change. The database has applications for conservation and restoration strategies at different spatial scales. 

 

Landscape resilience

Our mapping of landscape resilience combines spatial metrics based on landscape heterogeneity, a proxy for microclimatic variability, and local connectedness, a measure of connectivity between habitats, to determine landscape resilience. It assumes that resilience to climate change will be greater the more heterogeneous the characteristics of local habitats are and the more connected they are in the landscape.

 

Definitions

Landscape resilience is defined as the capacity of an area to absorb the impacts of climate change on species diversity and ecological functions. A resilient area presents variability of conditions that support biodiversity, maintaining fundamental relationships between ecological components, and allows for adaptive change in species composition and ecosystem structure. This metric was created by a process of overlaying the maps of landscape heterogeneity and local connectedness based on the distribution of the values of these metrics classified in quartiles. The different classes created by overlaying quartiles on the landscape resilience bivariate scale allow us to identify different areas of interest by the combination of both variables.

 

Landscape heterogeneity is a proxy for the variety of microclimates in a given location. Landscape heterogeneity summarizes information on: (a) landform variety, (b) elevation range, (c) wetland score, and (d) soil richness. This ensures the inclusion of distinct physical and environmental conditions, and allows local variations in the composition of the associated biota to be captured.

 

Local connectedness is a measure of how much resistance landscape elements (or types of land use and land cover) offer to the movement of species. We used the structural differences of the various types of land use and land cover as proxies of resistance, with natural areas being less resistant and highly impacted areas being more resistant to the movement of terrestrial organisms in the landscape. Resistance values are relative measures of the difficulty that different types of land use and land cover potentially confer on the movement of organisms in the landscape.

 

Interpreting landscape resilience categories

Landscape resilience was determined as the combination of landscape heterogeneity and local connectedness, generating a total of 16 combinations (classes), that were grouped in four quadrants. The classes and quadrants created in this framework allow for the identification of different areas of interest, for example areas that are priorities for conservation versus restoration, or those that may serve as ecological corridors.