Université du Québec à Montréal
Postdoctoral fellow candidate
Supervisor: Pedro Peres-Neto
Start: 2012-09-03
End: 2014-09-01

Project

Climate change impacts on protecting biodiversity through protected area networks
My main focus is to evaluate the future capacity of the protected area network to preserve mammalian biodiversity in a climate change context. There are more than 175 000 protected areas across the globe with much variability between regions in terms of the size of these protected areas and their connectivity. Furthermore, protected areas were designed to fulfill current conservation goals. It is thus possible that the current networks will not be as efficient in a future where species have shifted their distributions because of climate change. I will evaluate the spatial coverage of protected areas on species distributions with MaxEnt presence models of 4200 mammal species in a future climate. This spatial coverage, along with connectivity measures, will provide an index of the efficiency of current protected area networks to preserve mammalian biodiversity in a changing climate.

Keywords

climate change, biodiversity, protected areas, human ecology, global change, beaver

Publications

1- Demographic Amplification of Climate Change Experienced by the Contiguous United States Population during the 20th Century
Jason Samson, Dominique Berteaux, Brian J. McGill, Murray M. Humphries
2012 PLoS ONE

2- Variation in abundance across a species' range predicts climate change responses in the range interior will exceed those at the edge: a case study with North American beaver
JAREMA, STACEY I., JASON SAMSON, BRIAN J. MCGILL, MURRAY M. HUMPHRIES
2009 Global Change Biology

3- Geographic disparities and moral hazards in the predicted impacts of climate change on human populations
Samson, J., D. Berteaux, B. J. McGill, M. M. Humphries
2011 Global Ecology and Biogeography

4- Excavation is a Nondeleterious Method for Obtaining Fecundity and Morphometric Data from Small-Sized Eggs of Freshwater Turtles
Samson, Jason, Elinor J. Hughes, Ronald J. Brooks
2007 Chelonian Conservation and Biology