Assessing the impacts of uncertainty in climate-change vulnerability assessments

Abstract

Aim: The trait-based vulnerability assessment (TVA) uses Boolean rules to assess species sensitivity, adaptive capacity and exposure to climate change to identify those that are climate-change vulnerable. The protocol is being increasingly used to assess climate-change impacts to a diversity of taxa, as it requires fewer data compared to niche and mechanistic models. However, uncertainty in TVA results remains unevaluated. We present the first quantitative investigation of the impacts of uncertainty on TVA, using global freshwater crayfish (574 species) as a representative data-poor taxon. Location: Global. Methods: To assess uncertainty in trait selection, we measured the completeness of in..