Geographical range margins of many taxonomic groups continue to shift polewards

By Suzanna C. Mason, G. Palmer, R. Fox, Simon Gillings, Jane K. Hill, Christopher M Thomas, Tom H. Oliver. 2015

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many species are extending their leading-edge (cool) range margins polewards in response to recent climate change. In the present study, we investigated range margin changes at the northern (cool) range margins of 1573 southerly-distributed species from 21 animal groups in Great Britain over the past four decades of climate change, updating previous work. Depending on data availability, range margin changes were examined over two time intervals during the past four decades. For four groups (birds, butterflies, macromoths, and dragonflies and damselflies), there were sufficient data available to examine range margin changes over both time intervals. We found that most taxa shifted their northern range margins polewards and this finding was not greatly influenced by changes in recorder effort. The mean northwards range margin change in the first time interval was 23 km per decade (N = 13 taxonomic groups) and, in the second interval, was 18 km per decade (N = 16 taxonomic groups) during periods when the British climate warmed by 0.21 and 0.28 °C per decade, respectively. For the four taxa examined over both intervals, there was evidence for higher rate of range margin change in the more recent time interval in the two Lepidoptera groups. Our analyses confirm a continued range margin shift polewards in a wide range of taxonomic groups.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c80ca2f60d2302ea827035d5f344a99777bd7535

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Citations in the corpus

Distribution trends of European dragonflies under climate change (2019, background): “…temperatures, resulting in changes in the com‐ position of species communities (Chen, Hill, Ohlemüller, Roy, & Thomas, 2011; Hickling, Roy, Hill, Fox, & Thomas, 2006; Kampichler, Van Turnhout, Devictor, & Van der Jeugd, 2012; Lindström, Green, Paulson, Smith, & Devictor, 2013; Mason et al., 2015).”
Ips typographus and Dendroctonus ponderosae Models Project Thermal Suitability for Intra- and Inter-Continental Establishment in a Changing Climate (2019, background): “Ongoing range margin shifts northward are occurring in a wide range of taxa (Weed et al., 2013; Mason et al., 2015).”
The performance of protected areas for biodiversity under climate change (2015, background): “Evidence that widespread geographic range shifts are taking place in response to human-caused changes to the environment is increasingly strong (Mason et al., 2015, this volume), thanks to a combination of observation records collated by a variety of recording schemes, notably the UK Biological…”
The Biological Records Centre: a pioneer of citizen science (2015, background): “…of biological records were not anticipated when some of the recording began, e.g. range shifts in response to climate change (Hickling et al., 2006; Mason et al., 2015), pollinator declines (Biesmeijer et al., 2006) or impacts of alien species (Roy et al., 2012b, in press) and diseases (Purse &…”
Insect responses to global change offer signposts for biodiversity and conservation (2020, background): “There are many examples of high-latitude range margins of insects expanding polewards (Pöyry et al., 2009; Mason et al., 2015) and of range contractions or local extinctions at low-latitude or low-elevation range limits (Menéndez et al., 2014; Soroye et al., 2020).”