Climate-Related Local Extinctions Are Already Widespread among Plant and Animal Species

By John J. Wiens. PLoS Biology, 2016

628 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Current climate change may be a major threat to global biodiversity, but the extent of species loss will depend on the details of how species respond to changing climates. For example, if most species can undergo rapid change in their climatic niches, then extinctions may be limited. Numerous studies have now documented shifts in the geographic ranges of species that were inferred to be related to climate change, especially shifts towards higher mean elevations and latitudes. Many of these studies contain valuable data on extinctions of local populations that have not yet been thoroughly explored. Specifically, overall range shifts can include range contractions at the “warm edges” of species’ ranges (i.e., lower latitudes and elevations), contractions which occur through local extinctions. Here, data on climate-related range shifts were used to test the frequency of local extinctions related to recent climate change. The results show that climate-related local extinctions have already occurred in hundreds of species, including 47% of the 976 species surveyed. This frequency of local extinctions was broadly similar across climatic zones, clades, and habitats but was significantly higher in tropical species than in temperate species (55% versus 39%), in animals than in plants (50% versus 39%), and in freshwater habitats relative to terrestrial and marine habitats (74% versus 46% versus 51%). Overall, these results suggest that local extinctions related to climate change are already widespread, even though levels of climate change so far are modest relative to those predicted in the next 100 years. These extinctions will presumably become much more prevalent as global warming increases further by roughly 2-fold to 5-fold over the coming decades.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73f1071312a2a112eae7aec08b93b3f33b066daa

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Citations in the corpus

Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being (2017, neutral): “elevational range shifts (62) and will face greater economic constraints.”
Recent responses to climate change reveal the drivers of species extinction and survival (2020, positive): “We started with 27 studies from a systematic review of climate-related range shifts (28).”
Terrestrial insects and climate change: adaptive responses in key traits (2019, background): “Alongside the successful range shifts, there are many examples of failures to adapt; as ranges shift to meet new suitable climates, range contractions at the lower latitudes/elevations are typical and highlight a failure to adapt to warmer more variable climates (Wiens, 2016).”
The ‘golden kelp’ Laminaria ochroleuca under global change: Integrating multiple eco‐physiological responses with species distribution models (2018, background): “The latter responses may ultimately lead to local extinctions, especially in the case of sessile organisms (Parmesan, 2006; Wiens, 2016).”
Expanding, shifting and shrinking: The impact of global warming on species’ elevational distributions (2018, background): “…studies that have measured shifts across species’ entire elevational ranges associated with recent climate warming (Figure 1a) to test for differences in the rates of range shifts at species’ warm and cool range edges (building on recent reviews; e.g., Lenoir & Svenning, 2015; Wiens, 2016).”