PREDICT: Increasing the extent, transparency, and impact of predictions of population dynamics.

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2022

End date

12/31/2025

Budget

468,015 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

We are currently experiencing rapid climate change alongside a heavily human impacted landscape. How animal and plant populations will respond to these changes is still an open question. Predicting these responses is a key step required to help us manage and protect our natural environment. Despite big advances in our ability to create predictive models, there has not been as much advance in the way we account for and communicate the associated uncertainty of these models. This can undermine trust in science and limit the usefulness of predictions if we feel we cannot rely on them. PREDICT aims to improve our understanding of how natural populations will respond to future changes by improving the way in which we make predictions of biological change. We will simultaneously expand the reach of population predictions across more species, a greater spatial area, and improve reliability of the methods we use to generate the predictions. We will make use of exceptional long-term studies of animal populations to identify the contributions that different sources of uncertainty make to final population predictions. We also ask; how far into the future can we predict with confidence? Using the concept of ecological forecast horizons, we will identify the point at which predictions become too uncertain or inaccurate to remain useful. As a result, we can limit our predictions to only time periods with high confidence where predictions can be most useful. Ultimately, PREDICT will advance our understanding of species responses to climatic change and how well we are able to predict them.