Climate change threats to plant diversity in Europe.

By Wilfried Thuiller, S. Lavorel, Miguel B. Araújo, M. Sykes, I. C. Prentice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2005

2,610 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Climate change has already triggered species distribution shifts in many parts of the world. Increasing impacts are expected for the future, yet few studies have aimed for a general understanding of the regional basis for species vulnerability. We projected late 21st century distributions for 1,350 European plants species under seven climate change scenarios. Application of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources Red List criteria to our projections shows that many European plant species could become severely threatened. More than half of the species we studied could be vulnerable or threatened by 2080. Expected species loss and turnover per pixel proved to be highly variable across scenarios (27-42% and 45-63% respectively, averaged over Europe) and across regions (2.5-86% and 17-86%, averaged over scenarios). Modeled species loss and turnover were found to depend strongly on the degree of change in just two climate variables describing temperature and moisture conditions. Despite the coarse scale of the analysis, species from mountains could be seen to be disproportionably sensitive to climate change (approximately 60% species loss). The boreal region was projected to lose few species, although gaining many others from immigration. The greatest changes are expected in the transition between the Mediterranean and Euro-Siberian regions. We found that risks of extinction for European plants may be large, even in moderate scenarios of climate change and despite inter-model variability.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/083808ecbe63942b577cca05660290a4dd905634

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Citations in the corpus

Assessing the accuracy of species distribution models: prevalence, kappa and the true skill statistic (TSS) (2006, background): “... 2003; Rouget et al . 2004; Thuiller et al . 2005b), identify and manage threatened species (Engler, Guisan & Rechsteiner 2004; Norris 2004), prioritize places for biodiversity conservation (Araujo et al . 2004; Ortega-Huerta & Peterson 2004; Sanchez-Cordero et al . 2005) and evaluate the potenti”
Crop Wild Relatives—Undervalued, Underutilized and under Threat? (2011, neutral): “The International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List criteria have been applied to projections for species distributions in Europe under different climate change scenarios (Thuiller et al. 2005), which showed that many European plant species could become severely threatened.”
Climate change in Europe. 1. Impact on terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity. A review (2009, background): “Mountain communities may face up to a 60% loss of plant species under high emission scenarios, reversing the 20th century trend outlined above ( Thuiller et al., 2005; IPCC, 2007).”
Five (or so) challenges for species distribution modelling (2006, background): “…al., 2006), same region but different resolution (e.g. Araújo et al., 2005b; McPherson et al., 2006), different regions (e.g. Fielding & Haworth, 1995; Thuiller et al., 2005b; Randin et al., 2006; Segurado et al., 2006), or different time periods (e.g. Austin, 1992; Huntley et al., 1995; Sykes et…”
Do geographic distribution, niche property and life form explain plants' vulnerability to global change? (2006, methodology): “To date, SDMs have concentrated on quantifying species’ range changes, with few efforts to explain the predicted ecological patterns (but see Guisan & Theurillat, 2000; Peterson & Holt, 2003; Thuiller et al., 2005a).”
Uses and requirements of ecological niche models and related distributional models (2006, background): “…Podger et al. 1990; Richardson and McMahon 1992; Robertson et al. 2004; Sindel and Michael 1992; Skov 2000; Sutherst et al. 1999; Welk et al. 2002; Zalba et al. 2000 ), although the factors that make a species invasive are clearly more complex than just niche considerations (Thuiller et al. 2005b).”
Predicting climate‐induced range shifts: model differences and model reliability (2006, methodology): “Consequently, they have been used extensively in a wide range of studies (Pearson et al., 2002; Huntley et al., 2004; Thomas et al., 2004; Thuiller et al., 2005a, b).”
Promising the future? Global change projections of species distributions (2007, background): “At the same time, there is huge pressure from policy to provide estimates of species’ future distributions (Thuiller et al., 2005), guide reserve selection (Araújo & Williams, 2000) or forecast ecosystem impacts of climate change (Schröter et al., 2005).”
Effects of litter on seedling establishment in natural and semi‐natural grasslands: a meta‐analysis (2013, background): “Journal of Ecology © 2012 British Ecological Society, Journal of Ecology, 101, 454–464 1992; Thuiller et al. 2005).”
Potential impacts of climate change on the distributions and diversity patterns of European mammals (2007, methodology): “…(Pearson and Dawson 2003), and a number of modelling studies have been initiated in order to predict potential impacts on the distribution of plants (Skov and Svenning 2004; Thuiller et al. 2005a) and animals (Kerr and Packer 1998; Peterson et al. 2002; Erasmus et al. 2002; Meynecke 2004).”
Direct and Indirect Effects of Climate Change on Amphibian Populations (2010, neutral): “in species distributions [39,40].”