Identifying the World's Most Climate Change Vulnerable Species: A Systematic Trait-Based Assessment of all Birds, Amphibians and Corals

By W. Foden, S. Butchart, Simon N. Stuart, J. Vié, R. Akçakaya, A. Angulo, L. Devantier, A. Gutsche, E. Turak, Long Cao and 9 more. PLoS ONE, 2013

921 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Climate change will have far-reaching impacts on biodiversity, including increasing extinction rates. Current approaches to quantifying such impacts focus on measuring exposure to climatic change and largely ignore the biological differences between species that may significantly increase or reduce their vulnerability. To address this, we present a framework for assessing three dimensions of climate change vulnerability, namely sensitivity, exposure and adaptive capacity; this draws on species’ biological traits and their modeled exposure to projected climatic changes. In the largest such assessment to date, we applied this approach to each of the world’s birds, amphibians and corals (16,857 species). The resulting assessments identify the species with greatest relative vulnerability to climate change and the geographic areas in which they are concentrated, including the Amazon basin for amphibians and birds, and the central Indo-west Pacific (Coral Triangle) for corals. We found that high concentration areas for species with traits conferring highest sensitivity and lowest adaptive capacity differ from those of highly exposed species, and we identify areas where exposure-based assessments alone may over or under-estimate climate change impacts. We found that 608–851 bird (6–9%), 670–933 amphibian (11–15%), and 47–73 coral species (6–9%) are both highly climate change vulnerable and already threatened with extinction on the IUCN Red List. The remaining highly climate change vulnerable species represent new priorities for conservation. Fewer species are highly climate change vulnerable under lower IPCC SRES emissions scenarios, indicating that reducing greenhouse emissions will reduce climate change driven extinctions. Our study answers the growing call for a more biologically and ecologically inclusive approach to assessing climate change vulnerability. By facilitating independent assessment of the three dimensions of climate change vulnerability, our approach can be used to devise species and area-specific conservation interventions and indices. The priorities we identify will strengthen global strategies to mitigate climate change impacts.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/758650648170ad216f0e284c46102c4fa4c1c5f7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

In Ecology

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Banking on the future: progress, challenges and opportunities for the genetic conservation of forest trees (2017, background): “Conceptually (Foden et al. 2013), Project CAPTURE categorizes species based on the three dimensions of vulnerability: threat exposure, threat sensitivity, and adaptive capacity relative to the threat.”
Thermal-safety margins and the necessity of thermoregulatory behavior across latitude and elevation (2014, neutral): “P the organismal responses to climate change—a global priority—requires an understanding of the physiological, behavioral, ecological, and evolutionary factors that constrain where species can live (1, 2).”
Impact of climate change on biodiversity and associated key ecosystem services in Africa: a systematic review (2018, background): “…these fires are likely to get more intense and extensive and may result in significant ecosystem changes that would affect biodiversity through species loss or changes in species composition (Bellard et al. 2012; Foden et al. 2013; Akcakaya et al. 2014; Bland et al. 2015; Pacifici et al. 2015).”
Large‐scale DNA‐based survey of frogs in Amazonia suggests a vast underestimation of species richness and endemism (2020, background): “Even though such analyses recently reported that Amazonian amphibians are greatly affected by upcoming threats, including climate change (Foden et al., 2013), it would be necessary to reassess these modelling results based on more solid species occurrence data (Ficetola, Rondinini, Bonardi,…”
Persist in place or shift in space? Evaluating the adaptive capacity of species to climate change (2020, background): “Most approaches to date have used a restricted subset of broadly defined traits (Foden et al. 2013) or traits applicable only to specific taxa (Cabrelli et al.”
Multi-model ensemble projections of climate change effects on global marine biodiversity (2015, background): “Species may, however, vary considerably in the extent to which changes in their biophysical niche space impact their local, or overall, extinction risk due to particular life history characteristics, or traits (Foden et al., 2013; Garcia et al., 2014).”
Traits to stay, traits to move: a review of functional traits to assess sensitivity and adaptive capacity of temperate and boreal trees to climate change (2016, background): “The inclusion of functional traits in vulnerability assessments could permit a more quantitative assessment of species-specific sensitivity and adaptive capacity to climate change (Angert et al. 2011; Iverson et al. 2011; Matthews et al. 2011; McMahon et al. 2011; Foden et al. 2013; Prasad et al. 20”
Mapping human pressures on biodiversity across the planet uncovers anthropogenic threat complexes (2020, background): “However, the realized outcome of different drivers on biodiversity will ultimately depend on a combination of both the magnitude of exposure to drivers and species' sensitivities to environmental change (Foden et al., 2013).”
Conservation implications of ecological responses to extreme weather and climate events (2018, background): “A widely adopted framework for assessing vulnerability to climate change that measures species’ exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity (Foden et al., 2013) is also applicable to measurements of species’ vulnerability to extreme events.”
Migratory marine species: their status, threats and conservation management needs (2014, background): “Species’ sensitivity and adaptive capacity depends on a suite of taxon-specific biological and ecological traits; as well as the degree to which they are exposed to changes in climate (Burek et al., 2008; Foden et al., 2013).”