Research Alert
Hot Mess: How Amazon Primates Will Respond to Climate Change
1. Researchers investigated how climate change will affect the distribution of 80 Amazon primate species, finding that that species response to climate change varied across dispersal limitation scenarios.
2. If species could occupy all newly suitable climate, almost 70 percent of species could expand ranges; dispersal barriers (natural and anthropogenic), however, led to range expansion in only less than 20 percent of the studied species; scenarios where species that were not allowed to migrate lost an average of 90 percent of the suitable area.
3. Protecting important dispersal corridors between protected areas is foremost to allow effective migrations of the Amazon fauna in face of climate change and deforestation.
WCS Media Contact: Stephen Sautner, 7182203682, [email protected]
Study and Journal: "Recalculating route: Dispersal constraints will drive the redistribution of Amazon primates in the Anthropocene" from Ecography
WCS Co-Author(s): Colin Chapman , WCS Research Fellow