Climate Change and Biodiversity in the Atlantic Forest: Best Climatic Models, Predicted Changes and Impacts, and Adaptation Options

Ongoing anthropogenic climate change is becoming one of the major threats to biodiversity. Studies that aim at projecting the future impacts of ongoing climate change on biodiversity should use general circulation models (GCMs) that show a good performance in the region of study, an information that is lacking for the Atlantic Forest. Here, we evaluated the performance of different GCMs over the Atlantic Forest, describe the predicted climatic changes for the regions based on the best performing GCMs, review the literature on observed and predicted impacts of climate change on the Atlantic Forest biodiversity, and discuss adaptation strategies to reduce the negative impacts of climate change on the region’s biodiversity.