PS 23-31 - Classifying future bioclimates in Quebec: the winds of change are blowing

Background/Question/Methods

The impacts of climate change are increasingly being felt. Northern territories are among the most affected by these disturbances. What will be the consequences for Quebec’s bioclimates?

Our objective is to classify the bioclimates of the province of Quebec (Canada) in order to verify whether some of those present in the recent past will disappear from the province, to the benefit of others that were not there before. We portrayed the anticipated evolution of bioclimates based on Litynski’s numerical classification of world climates, which is based on three distinct climatic variables: average annual temperature, annual sum of precipitation, and the continental index. The latter is determined according to annual temperature range and latitude. Bioclimates distribution was performed by “K-means” clustering analysis, using 30-year climate normals covering the 1951–2100 period (1951–1980, 1961–1990, ..., 2071–2100). These were produced from a set of 11 post-processed global climate simulations forced by 2 greenhouse gas emission scenarios (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) and provided by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5. Monthly means (continentality index) and annual means (temperature and precipitation) were downloaded from the Power Analytics and Visualization for Climate Science platform (https://pavics.ouranos.ca/index.html).

Results/Conclusions

Preliminary results show radical changes by 2100 at the provincial scale. By this date, approximately 50% of the bioclimates now present in Quebec are predicted to have disappeared and to have been replaced by new ones. By the end of the century, most bioclimates observed in Quebec will be those currently found in the Maritime provinces, in the Northeastern United States region and the northeast portion of the Great Lakes region. These results illustrate the magnitude of the changes to come in Quebec and allow us to quantify them.

Such pressure caused by climatic stresses will considerably affect all of Quebec’s ecosystems, which will be forced to either cope, adapt, or be doomed to disappear.