Brockington Group: Forecasting the ex-situ conservation in 2100: climate-niche modelling to future-proof ex situ living collections
Supervisor
Professor Sam Brockington
Importance of Research
Botanic gardens hold living collections of roughly a third of all known plant species and are being positioned as an insurance policy against plant species extinction. Yet these collections are grown in fixed places whose climates are changing faster than the plants they contain. Median accession survival is only about fifteen years, and the single strongest predictor of whether a plant survives a planting is the climate of the locality from where it was sourced. Curatorial decisions are still made largely with no quantitative forecast of which taxa a given site will still support in fifty or a hundred years. Without such forecasts, gardens risk investing decades of care in collections, purporting to safeguard against extinction, but that their own climates will not sustain.
Project Summary
This project will build a predictive framework linking species climatic niches, climate projections and observed occurrence and survival, to forecast the future viability of living collections. Occurrence data from GBIF and provenance data from garden accession will be used to estimate realised and physiologically informed niches; CMIP6 scenarios will be downscaled to garden sites, survival analysis of long-term accession records will calibrate and validate niche-based predictions. The framework will then be inverted to become a decision tool: given a site and a scenario, which taxa should be acquired, which should be moved, and which should be devolved to a partner garden elsewhere.
What the successful applicant will do
You will assemble and curate accession and provenance datasets from international partners, fit correlative and mechanistic niche models, downscale climate projections to site and microsite scale, and build time-to-event models of accession survival. You will develop an open, reproducible R or Python toolkit and test it against retrospective predictions. Fieldwork is optional; collaboration with curatorial staff and with Botanic Gardens Conservation International is central.