The project used species distribution modeling to assess the risk to habitat change under various climate change scenarios for rare plants. To predict the response of rare plant species to climate change, the project modeled the current distribution of the species using climate and environmental data (e.g., soils, disturbance, land-use), use these models to predict the species distribution given climate change, calculate current and future range size, calculate the amount of overlap of predicted future distribution with current distribution, and assess where barriers and protected areas are located with reference to the change in species distribution. Given the results of the distribution modeling, each species was be scored with regard to predicted vulnerability to climate change. In addition, the modeling results will be used to identify areas of high rare plant diversity and to predict areas that will serve as climatic refugia in the future for rare plant diversity.
