Landscape resilience to climate change in Brazil

Landscape Resilience is defined as the capacity of an area to absorb the impacts of climate change on species diversity and ecological functions. A resilient area presents variability of conditions that support biodiversity, maintaining fundamental relationships between ecological components, and allows for adaptive change in species composition and ecosystem structure. This metric was created by a process of overlaying the maps of landscape heterogeneity and local connectedness based on the distribution of the values of these metrics classified in quartiles. The different classes created by overlaying quartiles on the landscape resilience bivariate scale allow us to identify different areas of interest by the combination of both variables. Landscape Heterogeneity is a proxy for the variety of microclimates in a given location. Landscape heterogeneity summarizes information on: (a) landform variety, (b) elevation range, (c) wetland score, and (d) soil richness. This ensures the inclusion of distinct physical and environmental conditions, and allows local variations in the composition of the associated biota to be captured. Local Connectedness is a measure of how much resistance landscape elements (or types of land use and land cover) offer to the movement of species. We used the structural differences of the various types of land use and land cover as proxies of resistance, with natural areas being less resistant and highly impacted areas being more resistant to the movement of terrestrial organisms in the landscape. Resistance values are relative measures of the difficulty that different types of land use and land cover potentially confer on the movement of organisms in the landscape. These values were assigned by biome.