Beyond Species: Predicting biodiversity change by integrating genetic diversity into ecological niche models

Climate change and biodiversity loss are accelerating, and both have major repercussions for human well-being. Recently, biodiversity modelling has developed tools to move from single-species studies to joint species models taking inter-dependence among species into account. In parallel, DNA barcoding and genomics allows economic screening of biological diversity at a higher resolution. Beyond Species will for the first time integrate both developments to move beyond the species level in two ways. We will first screen for intraspecific ‘evolutionary significant units’ (ESU) and second jointly model and predict the distributions of these units for all species in a community. We will demonstrate this novel approach for the entire community of insect-predatory bats for the Near East, Western and Central Asia – an under-researched region with extraordinary high biological diversity.