Critical areas for Conservation: Climate Change and Biodiversity in Central America, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic

This is one dataset in the series entitled, "Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Biodiversity in Central America, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic."

This study utilizes a geospatial approach to integrate climatological and biodiversity data to assess which areas might be significantly impacted by imminent changes in precipitation and temperature patterns. The general methods were classifying ecosystems, deriving species richness and endemism datasets, developing a Climate Change Severity Index, and subsequently identifying critical areas for conservation.

In these two GIS files, we identify the most species rich areas for each of the nine countries and subsequently overlap the highest climate change severity classes to identify critical areas for conservation. HADCM3 A2 and B2 scenarios for the 2020s and 2050s are included.

This study is one of the main deliverables to the USAID Global Development Alliance (GDA) program-funded "Mainstreaming Climate Indices Weather Derivatives into Decision-Making for Adaptation to Climate Change in Central America, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic" project, implemented by CATHALAC with the collaboration of USAID, NASA, the University of Alabama-Huntsville, ESRI, and Cable Wireless Panama.