Active Projects

2025 Integrated Responses to Biodiversity and Climate Change Grant Recipients 

Status, Impacts, and Potential of Community Conservation in Land and Marine Systems

Principal Investigators: Daniel Miller (Coyle Mission Collegiate Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame), Pamela Jagger (Professor of Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan), and Johan Oldekop (Professor of Environment and Development, University of Manchester)

Project Description: Indigenous Peoples and other land-connected communities are critical to conserving land and marine systems worldwide. Yet comprehensive global analysis of the extent of community conservation, how it varies, and its impact on biodiversity, climate, and human development remains lacking. As a result, communities, policymakers, and practitioners alike are hampered in their efforts to achieve these sustainability goals in an era of rapid change.

This project marshals the expertise and experience of a diverse interdisciplinary team, including researchers with natural and social science expertise as well as practitioners representing community and conservation organizations, to address these knowledge gaps. The team will do so through conceptual and evidence synthesis based on systematic review, geospatial analysis, and horizon scanning methodologies. This research will advance sustainability science and policy by collating and making publicly available relevant large-scale datasets, publishing high-profile journal articles, and carrying out related outreach.

Climate Change, Biodiversity, and Environmental Justice: A Synthesis of Ecological and Socioeconomic Risks

Principal Investigators: Jason Rohr (Ludmilla F., Stephen J., and Robert T. Galla College Professor, University of Notre Dame) & Thiago Gonçalves-Souza (Assistant Research Scientist, University of Michigan)

Project Description: Climate change is transforming the natural world in ways that ripple across societies. Rising temperatures are reshaping where species live, how they interact, and how ecosystems function. These shifts can fuel biodiversity loss, spread invasive species, and increase risks from crop pests and disease, all of which disproportionately affect vulnerable communities.This project brings together an international team of scientists from ecology, climate science, public health, and social science to better forecast these risks. Using one of the most comprehensive global datasets on how species respond to temperature, the team will develop models that help predict which species are most vulnerable, which invaders may spread, and where disease threats may intensify. Importantly, the research integrates ecological data with socioeconomic information to identify not just biological risks, but also who is most likely to bear them.

The project team will synthesize existing knowledge, develop new analytical tools, and produce maps and frameworks that inform biodiversity, conservation, and public health planning. By linking climate-driven changes in biodiversity with issues of food security, disease, and equity, this work aims to guide more effective and fair adaptation strategies. In summary, the project will provide insights into how climate change affects both ecosystems and people, while highlighting solutions that protect biodiversity and promote environmental justice.

Advancing oxythermal habitat modeling with AI to predict impacts to central US fish species richness under climate change

Principal Investigators: Stephen Jane (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Michigan), Stefano Castruccio (Notre Dame Collegiate Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame)

Project Description: Warming lake surface temperatures cause substantial changes to thermal habitat for ectothermic fishes. Not only are surface temperatures increasing, but the seasonal duration of warm surface temperatures is lengthening. The implications of changing lake thermal structure for fish habitat have been an area of active research. However, warming also prolongs summer stratification, the condition where warm surface water floats over more dense, cold subsurface water. This condition limits vertical transport of oxygen from surface oxygen sources and into deep waters. Deoxygenation of deep waters due to prolonged stratification is now recognized as a systematic response of lakes to warming globally. Deep water oxygen concentrations are declining on average, the volume of low oxygen water is expanding, and deoxygenated conditions are lasting longer annually. Low oxygen can exclude fish from accessing habitat, even when temperatures are optimal. Many fish species are increasingly squeezed into small volumes of water between excessively warm surface temperatures and deoxygenated water at depth. This working group has been developing artificial intelligence approaches to model daily oxygen and temperature conditions across thousands of central US lakes through time. We will combine these with fish distribution data from NatureServe and other sources. Using these data, we will map the resulting AI generated oxythermal data to literature derived fish oxygen and temperature tolerances for central US fishes. We will project likely shifts in species composition through time, both over historical and future periods. A central hypothesis of this work is that the combined effects of changing temperature and oxygen will exceed those of temperature in isolation. We also hypothesize that northern regions of the US are likely to see increases in potential richness, while simultaneously undergoing loss of habitable lakes for culturally important fish species.