WCS 3-Sentence Science

Hot Mess: How Amazon Primates Will Respond to Climate Change

October 21, 2019

CREDIT: CARLOS DURIGAN

Each year, Wildlife Conservation Society scientists publish more than 300 peer-reviewed studies and papers. “WCS 3-Sentence Science” is a regular tip-sheet — in bite sized helpings — of some of this published work.

Here we present work by WCS’s Colin Chapman look at the effect of climate change on primates in the Amazon.

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.

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

For more information, contact: Stephen Sautner, 718–220–3682, ssautner@wcs.org.