Dynamique des communautés de forêts tropicales humides en Afrique: implication pour la conservation de la biodiversité tropicale et l’atténuation des changements climatiques (RAINBIO)

The tropical rain forests of Africa harbor high levels of unique biodiversity, but are under immediate threat of extinction due to increasing anthropogenic activities and global warming. Protecting this important biodiversity reservoir requires a better understanding of plant distributions as well as past and future vegetation dynamics. Major initiatives have already generated large georeferenced databases of African plants, but these have yet to be combined and analyzed to provide a truly concerted view of rain forest biodiversity. The goals of the project are two-fold and are aimed at the Central African region. 1) Produce a new openly-available platform containing an updatable online database of rain forest plant distributions including tools to perform species modeling and conservation status assessments. This will be achieved by compiling existing public and non-public datasets made available via the consortium. 2) Use this platform to model numerous rain forest restricted species distributions at several time intervals in the past and the future using ecological niche modeling. The results will provide an unmatched view of species-diversity dynamics over time in Central Africa and conclusions shall be made about the role of forest refugia for conservation. The compiled data will be the basis for suitable conservation strategies of African biodiversity and will be used for a better assessment of conservation status in the face of future climate change.

Trefwoorden:B270-plantenecologie, B290-taxonomie-van-planten