ABSTRACT
Climate change will drastically affect the ecosystems present in British Columbia. In order to prepare BC for the changes to come, we used a climate envelope model to make a prediction map of the 14 Biogeoclimatic (BEC) zones in 2050 using the CGCM2 A2x model. Three orthogonal canonical discriminant functions were used to describe the realized climate space for British Columbia’s ecosystems under current and predicted future climates. We analyzed how the distribution of the zones changed in area, elevation and latitude. Alpine tundra lost the most area while Engelmann Spruce-Subalpine Fir and Interior Coastal Hemlock gained the most area and Coastal Douglas Fir and Ponderosa Pine gained the most percent area. BEC zones moved to higher elevations, displacing alpine tundra. Southern ecosystems moved north between 100 and 700 Km in the 40 year time frame. The model did a fairly good job of predicting where BC's BEC zones could be located in the future.
Geography 376 - Advanced GIS
University of British Columbia
Emma Harrower
Raphael Chavardes