Changes in Protected Areas: the ECOPOTENTIAL view

Protected Areas are subject to long-term modifications associated with climate and environmental change, enhancing the risk of ecosystem collapse, tipping points and unexpected responses to droughts, fires, floods and other individual events. One of the goals of the EU H2020 Project ECOPOTENTIAL and of the GEO ECO Initiative of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) is to quantify ongoing and expected changes in the drivers and the characteristics of Protected Areas in Europe and beyond, using gridded climatic datasets, in situ meteo-climatic and biological data and Remote Sensing observations. Several statistical approaches are used to this goal, with the aim of determining the patterns and properties of the changes currently affecting Protected Areas. Use of suitably downscaled climate scenarios allows for estimating how such changes are projected into the next decades. Here we report the results on the changes in meteo-climatic drivers and in some remotely-sensed variables for the set of Protected Areas participating in the ECOPOTENTIAL project, focusing on a few specific examples encompassing mountain, arid/semi-arid and coastal ecosystems.