Climate-driven range changes in Tasmanian intertidal fauna

By Nicole R. Pitt, E. Poloczanska, A. Hobday. 2010

109 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The south-eastern coast of Australia is recognised as a climate-change hotspot; warming over the past 50 years has exceeded the global average. The marine fauna in the region is responding to this warming with several subtidal species showing a pole-ward range expansion. We provide the first evidence for a similar response in intertidal invertebrates, on the basis of surveys from the eastern coast of Tasmania in 2007–2008 that replicated a set from the 1950s. Of 29 species used in the analysis, 55% were detected further south than in the 1950s. The average minimum movement of the southern (pole-ward) range edges was 116 km (range 20–250 km), representing a rate of ∼29 km per decade for a warming rate of 0.22°C per decade. Barnacles and gastropods showed the greatest range extensions, with one species absent from Tasmania in the 1950s, the giant rock barnacle, Austromegabalanus nigrescens, now recorded widely along the eastern coast of Tasmania. The distance that the southern (pole-ward) range limit moved south for each species was not related to a qualitative dispersal potential index. Local extinction of some species in north-eastern Tasmania may also occur in the coming decades.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be3b600c24d4f5aa2e723ee4941869c6a0f83d8e

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In Global and Planetary Change

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Citations in the corpus

Climate-change induced tropicalisation of marine communities in Western Australia (2012, background): “In Australia, 45 marine species off the southeastern coast (around Tasmania) were found to display major shifts in distribution from the late 1800s to the present, which may be linked to climate change (Pitt et al. 2010; Last et al. 2011).”
Rapid assessment of fisheries species sensitivity to climate change (2014, unknown): “2009), bivalves and gastropods (Pitt et al. 2010).”
Socio-economic and management implications of range-shifting species in marine systems (2012, background): “There are, however, potential artifacts in the documentation of species’ range shifts where studies are limited by a relevant baseline (e.g., surveys conducted in 1950 and repeated in 2008; Pitt et al., 2010).”
The broad footprint of climate change from genes to biomes to people (2016, background): “To illustrate this point, corals around Japan have shifted their range by up to 14 km per year over the past 80 years (86), and in waters off the southeast coast of Australia, intertidal invertebrate species have shifted their geographic distributions polewards at an average rate of 29 km per decade”
The 'Great Southern Reef': social, ecological and economic value of Australia's neglected kelp forests (2016, background): “2009), a range of intertidal invertebrates (Pitt et al. 2010), zooplankton (Johnson et al.”