Recent responses to climate change reveal the drivers of species extinction and survival

By Cristian Román‐Palacios, John J. Wiens. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020

596 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance The response of species to climate change is of increasingly urgent importance. Here, we address the specific changes in climate that were associated with recent population extinctions, using data from 538 plant and animal species distributed globally. Surprisingly, extinctions occurred at sites with smaller changes in mean annual temperatures but larger increases in hottest yearly temperatures. We also evaluate whether species may survive climate change by dispersing, shifting their niches to tolerate warmer conditions, or both. Given dispersal alone, many of these species (∼57–70%) may face extinction. However, niche shifts can potentially reduce this to only 30% or less. Overall, our results show the importance of maximum temperatures for causing species extinction and niche shifts for allowing their survival. Climate change may be a major threat to biodiversity in the next 100 years. Although there has been important work on mechanisms of decline in some species, it generally remains unclear which changes in climate actually cause extinctions, and how many species will likely be lost. Here, we identify the specific changes in climate that are associated with the widespread local extinctions that have already occurred. We then use this information to predict the extent of future biodiversity loss and to identify which processes may forestall extinction. We used data from surveys of 538 plant and animal species over time, 44% of which have already had local extinctions at one or more sites. We found that locations with local extinctions had larger and faster changes in hottest yearly temperatures than those without. Surprisingly, sites with local extinctions had significantly smaller changes in mean annual temperatures, despite the widespread use of mean annual temperatures as proxies for overall climate change. Based on their past rates of dispersal, we estimate that 57–70% of these 538 species will not disperse quickly enough to avoid extinction. However, we show that niche shifts appear to be far more important for avoiding extinction than dispersal, although most studies focus only on dispersal. Specifically, considering both dispersal and niche shifts, we project that only 16–30% of these 538 species may go extinct by 2070. Overall, our results help identify the specific climatic changes that cause extinction and the processes that may help species to survive.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/202d2996c8d90cfde852ec4170f9fa2756605fb9

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Citations in the corpus

A quantitative review of abundance-based species distribution models (2021, background): “Environmental change alters the occurrence and local abundance patterns of species (Hastings et al. 2020, Román-Palacios and Wiens 2020, Lenoir et al. 2020, Antão et al. 2020b).”
Insect responses to global change offer signposts for biodiversity and conservation (2020, background): “…important as drivers of insect population dynamics and extirpations (McDermott Long et al., 2017; Palmer et al., 2017; Forister et al., 2018; Román-Palacios & Wiens, 2020) but rarely feature explicitly in SDMs. Night time minimum temperatures are warming faster than daytime maxima, limiting…”