University of Vermont researchers will play a leadership role in a project designed to predict where populations of plants and animals in New England will move as their current locations become less hospitable in a warming world. Data generated by the project will help New England farmers and rural communities plan and adapt to the range shifts.

The National Science Foundation awarded $4 million over four years to the EPSCoR Research Infrastructure project to develop novel approaches and software for modeling, visualizing and forecasting spatial and temporal data.

The research team — which includes faculty from the University of Maine and Champlain College, in addition to UVM — will build some of the first mechanistic models of shifts in species ranges in response to climate change. The interdisciplinary research initiative is being led by the University of Maine.