Predicting the potential geographic distribution of weeds in 2080

摘要

Accounting for climate change is an important factor to consider in weed risk assessments and can be useful when planning strategic management approaches and targeting weed education initiatives. Global climate modelling has now reached a sufficient level of maturity that regional climate models can be used with greater confidence to apply future climate scenarios to biophysical models. Data from four Global Climate Models using four SRES emission scenarios (IPCC 2000) were used to develop a framework for generating climate change surfaces for use in CL1MEX~(TM). The supplied variables were transformed and reformatted and, where necessary, new variables were estimated. Using this framework, future climate surfaces can be generated for any user-defined period up to 2100 and applied to any base climatology by interpolating the change surfaces. The future climate surfaces have been applied to the climate models of three important weeds in Australia with contrasting climatic requirements (prickly acacia. Acacia nilotica (L.) Willd. ex Delile, Siam weed Chromolaena odorata (L.) R.M.King & H.Rob., and buddleia, Buddleja davidii Franch.) to show a range of possible future distributions for them in Australia.