Forecasting Biomes Of Protected Areas

AbstractProtected areas are designed for a range of purposes, mainly with the aim of protecting certain habitats including their associated species. The possible threats have mainly been thought of as anthropogenic influences such as deforestation from lodging and fires, hunting, construction of roads and houses etc. The biomes of the park have been assumed to be the constant, so that the distribution of animals and vegetation would only change rapidly due to direct anthropogenic influence. However, with a changing climate, the conditions within the park might change to conditions unsuitable for the current population of animals and vegetation within relatively short time. In this paper we will introduce eHabitat, a Web Processing Service (WPS) designed to compute the likelihood of finding ecosystems with equal properties. We present a use case where eHabitat is applied to an ensemble of climate change scenarios, in order to compute the probability that an ecosystem's ecological niche will occur in a particular location in the future. This will help us to identify the future suitability of an area for a particular ecosyste