Projected Impacts of Climate and Land-Use Change on the Global Diversity of Birds

By Walter Jetz, D. Wilcove, A. Dobson. PLoS Biology, 2007

1,096 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the past few decades, land-use and climate change have led to substantial range contractions and species extinctions. Even more dramatic changes to global land cover are projected for this century. We used the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment scenarios to evaluate the exposure of all 8,750 land bird species to projected land-cover changes due to climate and land-use change. For this first baseline assessment, we assumed stationary geographic ranges that may overestimate actual losses in geographic range. Even under environmentally benign scenarios, at least 400 species are projected to suffer >50% range reductions by the year 2050 (over 900 by the year 2100). Although expected climate change effects at high latitudes are significant, species most at risk are predominantly narrow-ranged and endemic to the tropics, where projected range contractions are driven by anthropogenic land conversions. Most of these species are currently not recognized as imperiled. The causes, magnitude and geographic patterns of potential range loss vary across socioeconomic scenarios, but all scenarios (even the most environmentally benign ones) result in large declines of many species. Whereas climate change will severely affect biodiversity, in the near future, land-use change in tropical countries may lead to yet greater species loss. A vastly expanded reserve network in the tropics, coupled with more ambitious goals to reduce climate change, will be needed to minimize global extinctions.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ab75a4b7def80acaf354625632461a7ea2cb2f6d

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Citations in the corpus

Cross-scale variation in species richness–environment associations (2011, background): “Distributions for birds were compiled from the best available sources for a given geographical region or taxonomic group (Jetz et al., 2007).”
Climate change‐linked range expansion of Nathusius’ pipistrelle bat, Pipistrellus nathusii (Keyserling & Blasius, 1839) (2010, background): “Species especially susceptible to climate warming may include those with distributions in the northern-boreal and arctic zones (Kerr & Packer, 1998; Sala et al., 2000; Jetz et al., 2007; Virkkala et al., 2008).”
Climate change impacts in Latin America and the Caribbean and their implications for development (2017, neutral): “…Hof et al. 2011; Loyola et al. 2013; Mesquita et al. 2013; Lemes et al. 2014), sea turtles (Fish et al. 2005), birds (Anciães and Peterson 2006; Jetz et al. 2007, Marini et al. 2009; Souza et al. 2011), marsupials (Loyola et al. 2012), mammals (Schloss et al. 2012; Torres et al. 2012) and…”
Potential impacts of climatic change on the breeding and non‐breeding ranges and migration distance of European Sylvia warblers (2009, background): “Responses of human land-use to climatic change may exacerbate this problem if they further reduce habitat availability (Erasmus et al., 2002; Jetz et al., 2007).”
Different evolutionary histories underlie congruent species richness gradients of birds and mammals (2012, background): “Global-scale distributional databases have been generated for birds (Orme et al., 2005; Hawkins et al., 2007; Jetz et al., 2007) and mammals (Grenyer et al.”
A protocol for an intercomparison of biodiversity and ecosystem services models using harmonized land-use and climate scenarios (2018, methodology): “INSIGHTS and MOL used an hierarchical approach with two steps: first, a statistical model trained on current species ranges is used to assess future climate suitability within species ranges; second, an expert-based model detailing associations between species and habitat types is used to assess the”
The fate of European breeding birds under climate, land‐use and dispersal scenarios (2012, background): “, 2006) and to estimate species turnover and local extinction (Thuiller et al., 2005; Jetz et al., 2007).”
Homage to Linnaeus: How many parasites? How many hosts? (2008, methodology): “In particular, bird species with small ranges are at a much greater risk of extinction than those with large geographical ranges (39).”
Ecological and economic cost-benefit analysis of offshore wind energy (2009, background): “For birds, the subject of somuch concern over wind power, it is estimated that 950–1800 species of terrestrial birds (out of 8750 studied) will be threatened due (in part) to climate change [56].”
Assessing species vulnerability to climate and land use change: the case of the Swiss breeding birds (2014, background): “In particular, we could not account for future changes in habitat quality, but most species will be affected by more specific habitat changes than those captured by the broad land use variables traditionally used in modelling exercises (Jetz et al., 2007).”
Biotic homogenization: Loss of avian functional richness and habitat specialists in disturbed Andean temperate forests (2015, background): “Although patterns of taxonomic homogenization are reasonably well known (Jetz et al., 2007;McKinney and Lockwood, 1999), functional homogenization has received attention only recently (Devictor et al., 2008a; Le Viol et al., 2012).”
Global Biodiversity Change: The Bad, the Good, and the Unknown (2012, background): “Further climate change impacts in these regions have been projected for birds (139) and for plants (46) during this century.”
Impact of climate change on migratory birds: community reassembly versus adaptation (2007, background): “Climate change and habitat loss are the two greatest threats to biodiversity in the present century (Sala et al. , 2000; Carpenter et al ., 2005; Jetz et al ., 2007 ).”