Assessing and Mapping Rare Plant Species Vulnerability to Climate Change

This project uses species distribution modeling to assess the risk to habitat change under climate change scenarios for rare plants. The project models the current distribution of the species, uses these models to predict the species distribution given climate change, calculates current and future range size, calculates the amount of overlap of predicted future distribution with current distribution, and assesses where barriers and protected areas are located with reference to the change in species distribution. The modeling results will be used to identify areas of high rare plant diversity and to predict areas that will serve as climatic refugia in the future for rare plant diversity.