2.7. Climate change scenarios

Model simulations were performed using historic and projected future climate data to predict the effect of climate change on seasonal L3 availability at different elevations (see electronic supplementary material). For the historic climate observations, data were extracted from the E-OBS gridded dataset for a 30-year period (1976–2005) and the projected climate data were taken from the high emissions scenario (representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5) from the HADGEM-ES model output for a 30-year period (2066–2095) [44]. Mean daily temperature and total daily precipitation were adjusted for the elevation of each compartment as described above for historic data.

The simulations were run for four different scenarios: (i) historic: historic climate and observed host movement; (ii) projection 1: projected climate and observed host movement; (iii) projection 2: projected climate and predicted host movement (for ibex; observed sheep movement), and (iv) projection 3: projected climate and predicted host movement (both ibex and sheep). Predicted host movement was computed based on the drivers of host elevation and extrapolated for projected climate scenarios (§2.4).