In 2018, the Spanish Committee of the IUCN carried out a review of the IUCN Red List files of all the threatened species present in Spanish territory. As a result of this work, they detected a large number of species whose file had become "outdated", that is, more than ten years after their publication and, therefore, their evaluation. In this time, both ecological and environmental conditions had changed, and more accurate climate models had been developed.
Therefore, the project of the Spanish Committee of the IUCN has made it possible to update the analysis and evaluation of the potential effects of climate change on a total of 10 species of terrestrial vertebrates present in the Iberian Peninsula.
The project has aimed to analyse and assess the potential effect of the different climate change scenarios on threatened terrestrial vertebrate species in the Iberian Peninsula, included in the IUCN Red List, through:
The IUCN Spanish Committee, in collaboration with its members, worked towards the following objectives:
The results showed for four of the species analysed a considerable decrease in favourable areas in the future according to the most extreme climate change scenarios. For the rest of the species, the forecasts either did not detect changes in the favorable areas, or they detected an increase. It is therefore recommended that the IUCN prioritize the reassessment of those species whose distributions could also decrease due to the effects of climate change, as well as develop adaptation measures, both legislative, ex situ and in situ conservation, in the recent term.
You can click on the following terrestrial vertebrate sheets by species to view them:
Analysis of the effect of climate change on threatened terrestrial vertebrates included in the IUCN Red List, using species distribution models