Shifting corridors in the Amazon

Amazon rainforests are predicted to be particularly vulnerable to future climate change.  While many other biomes are expected to shift to climatic analogs, or replicates of habitat with similar abiotic conditions but in a new location under climate change, Amazon rainforests in particular are likely to have trouble keeping pace with this change.  This problem is exacerbated by deforestation, which creates barriers to movement for individuals and disrupts natural corridors running through the rainforests.  In their new paper in Global Change Biology, Feeley and Rehm quantify this intersection between climate change and deforestation.  They examine how the combination of these two factors affects the distance between climate analogs, and how species may be unsuccessful in navigating corridors as a result.  They conclude that in order to mitigate for such future change, it is important to incorporate both shifts in habitat due to abiotic factors such as temperature and precipitation, and changes in habitat composition due to human land use.  By doing so, there is a greater likelihood of maintaining short distances between current and future high quality habitat that facilitates species dispersal.