A LAND OF FLOWERS ON A LATITUDE OF DESERTS: AIDING CONSERVATION AND MANAGEMENT OF FLORIDA'S BIODIVERSITY BY USING PREDICTIONS FROM “DOWN-SCALED” AOGCM CLIMATE SCENARIOS IN COMBINATION WITH ECOLOGICAL MODELING

La Florida (Land of Flowers) straddles latitudes forming the northern hemisphere’s desert belt. Orlando is one degree latitude south of Cairo, Egypt. Florida is unique because it is a peninsula surrounded by warm water. How will Florida’s biodiversity respond to a changing climate? Which species and habitats will increase? or decrease? What role does land use–land cover (LULC) change play? Before these questions can be answered, accurate regional climate change scenarios must be developed. We are down-scaling predictions from three coupled Atmospheric-Ocean General Circulation Models and making regional predictions for Florida and the adjacent southeastern US. Climate predictions are being used as inputs to a suite of species / habitat / ecosystem models that are currently being used in two areas where we have existing ecological models: the Greater Everglades and Suwannee River-Big Bend. Selected species include: manatee, alligator, crocodile, wading birds and a number of tropical tree species. Three scenarios of LULC: past (≈1900), present, future (2041-2070) are employed. Additional climate model runs will address the contribution of green house gasses to climate variability and change. Model perturbation experiments will be performed to address sources of variability and their contribution to the output regional climate change scenarios. We have scenarios that specifically address potential change in temperature and rainfall fields over the study region. We are providing these scenarios and modeling results to resource management groups via workshops in which the scenarios will be used to predict responses of additional selected species, habitats and ecosystems.