Current climate data, and projections how climate may change in the (near) future, are important for various reasons. For example, such data can be used to predict how habitat suitability for different animal and plant species or agricultural productivity changes over time.
Thus, in this post, I am showing how to get data on recent and projected climate directly into R, crop the obtained object to the area of interest (here: South America), and then calculate and illustrate the projected change.
Interested in the distribution of animal species on a global or continental level? This can be easily illustrated with R using the data provided by the IUCN Red List. In this post, I will focus on mammals in Africa, the continent where I have conducted most of my field work. But the code below can be easily adapted to other areas of the world and other taxonomic groups of species, or only species at low or high risk of extinction (though the completeness of the IUCN data is variable across different groups).