Visualization of Biosphere Changes in the Context of Climate Change Thomas Nocke, Ursula Heyder, Stefan Petri, Katrin Vohland, Markus Wrobel, Wolfgang Lucht Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Telegrafenberg, 14473 Potsdam, Germany nocke,heyder,petri,vohland,wrobel,lucht@pik-potsdam.de Abstract To bridge the gap between climate impact research on the one hand and decision makers and the public on the other hand, we introduce an new approach visualizing climate driving forces together with their pos- sible impacts onto the biosphere. Therefore, an interactive tool synchronizing multiple-views has been de- signed and implemented, providing easy-to-use access to simulation results for several driving climate models, emission scenarios, vegetation variables / classifications and statistical derivations. It provides in- tuitive access to temporal and spatial regions of interest. Furthermore, to deploy this tool in different use cases, a mechanism for fast image pre-calculation in different image resolutions has been implemented. Keywords: Climate Impact Research, Visualization, Biome Shift, Biodiversity, Ecosystem Services, Un- certainties 1. Introduction The communication of scientific results in climate change and climate impact research is a challenging problem due the complexity of the applied models and their basics as well as the diversity of research fields involved (meteorology, climatology, biology etc.). Im- portant examples for this complexity are the interrelations of biome shifts with the drivers CO 2 , temperature, and precipitation as well as with the main ecosystem services (car- bon sequestration, carbon storage and soil water content). On one hand, this complexity hampers the investigation of such interrelations by scientists. On the other hand, com- municating scientific results with relation to biodiversity and ecosystem research includ- ing their inherent uncertainties to decision makers and to the general public in an easily- understandable way is of growing importance. In this context, interactive visualization and graphical user interfaces can play a key role in analyzing and presenting scientific results on the projected impacts of climate change, bridging the gap between the com-