Climate change is now seen as one of the greatest threats to biodiversity in the 21^st century.  Global warming, changes in precipitation patterns, ocean acidification, shifts in ocean currents, etc. are projected to result in large losses or shifts in the distribution of species, habitats and biomes. These changes in biodiversity will have large impacts on ecosystem services including the regulation of regional and global climate.

The goal of the Humboldt project is to make substantial progress in the development and testing of biodiversity models by bringing together scientists from the climate-environment-society consortium working in the fields of biodiversity, climate and ocean environment research. The project will focus on networking these communities within the consortium and improving the visibility of its research on this field at national and international levels, with the specific target of fostering collaborations that lead to proposals for additional national or international funding. The project will also include several research tasks:

• Using state-of-the-art climate and biodiversity models to test the effects of climate regionalization and climate variability on projected biodiversity response to 21^st century climate change.
• Improving the representation of biodiversity in regional and global models of forests to better understand the impact of climate change on tree distributions and forest ecosystem functioning.

The proposed work also includes the creation of a Climate / Biodiversity Scenarios service that will assist biodiversity researchers in identifying the best adapted climate projections for their research, as well as providing assistance with the understanding and use of these projections.