One hundred years of climate change in Mexico

Spatial assessments of historical climate change are of paramount importance to focus research and conservation efforts. Despite the fact that there are global climatic databases available at high spatial resolution, they present some shortcomings to evaluate historic trends of climate change and their impacts on biodiversity. These databases span over a single period in the late 20th and early 21th centuries and their quality and reliability in many regions is compromise because they have not been produce with all information available for all regions. Therefore, in this contribution we developed climatic surfaces for Mexico for three periods that cover most of the 20th and early 21th centuries: t1-1940 (1910-1949), t2-1970(1950-1979) and t3-2000 (1980-2009), and characterize climate change rates of the bio-geographic provinces of Mexico via a linear trend analysis of monthly values and a Mann-Kendall analysis. Our results indicate that rates of change and trends have not been uniform across Mexico: Nearctic provinces had suffered higher and more consistent trends of changethan southern tropical regions. Central and southern provinces cooled down at the beginning of the 20th century, but warmed up consistently since the 1970s. Precipitation has generally increased throughout the country, being more notorious in northern provinces. We aim to provide modellers with a set of climate surfaces that may help decision-making to improve management strategies for biodiversity conservation.