Hot and bothered: Using trait-based approaches to assess climate change vulnerability in reptiles
By M. Böhm, Danielle Cook, Heidi Ma, Ana D. Davidson, Andrés García, B. Tapley, P. Pearce-Kelly, Jamie Carr. 2016
118 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract One-fifth of the world's reptiles are currently estimated as threatened with extinction, primarily due to the immediate threats of habitat loss and overexploitation. Climate change presents an emerging slow-acting threat. However, few IUCN Red List assessments for reptiles explicitly consider the potential role of climate change as a threat. Thus, climate change vulnerability assessments can complement existing Red List assessments and highlight further, emerging priorities for conservation action. Here we present the first trait-based global climate change vulnerability assessment for reptiles to estimate the climate change vulnerability of a random representative sample of 1498 species of reptiles. We collected species-specific traits relating to three dimensions of climate change, sensitivity, low adaptability, and exposure, which we combined to assess overall vulnerability. We found 80.5% of species highly sensitive to climate change, primarily due to habitat specialisation, while 48% had low adaptability and 58% had high exposure. Overall, 22% of species assessed were highly vulnerable to climate change. Hotspots of climate change vulnerability did not always overlap with hotspots of threatened species richness, with most of the vulnerable species found in northwestern South America, southwestern USA, Sri Lanka, the Himalayan Arc, Central Asia and southern India. Most families were found to be significantly more vulnerable to climate change than expected by chance. Our findings build on previous work on reptile extinction risk to provide an overview of the risk posed to reptiles by climate change. Despite significant data gaps for a number of traits, we recommend that these findings are integrated into reassessments of species' extinction risk, to monitor both immediate and slow-acting threats to reptiles.
Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d15097a70871cb1415f4f1296ec32ff08048bf7c
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, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Addressing knowledge gaps in reptile conservation (2016, background): “…groups such as GARD (Global Assessment of Reptile Distributions; http://www.gardinitiative.org), are narrowing this taxonomic gap (Meiri et al., 2012; Tingley et al., 2013a, 2013b; Ducatez et al., 2014; Bland and Böhm, 2016; Böhm et al., 2016a, 2016b; Tonini et al., 2016; Tingley et al., in press).”
- Biases in the current knowledge of threat status in lizards, and bridging the ‘assessment gap’ (2016, unknown): “However, since the publication of Böhm et al. (2013) there has been a flurry of analyses based on species assessed by the IUCN (Böhm et al., 2016–in this issue; Tomovic et al., 2015; Tolley et al., 2016–in this issue; Roll et al., 2016–in this issue; Bland and Böhm, 2016–in this issue; Tolley et…”
- Global gaps in trait data for terrestrial vertebrates (2020, background): “…processes and species coexistence (Escudero & Valladares, 2016; Zamudio et al., 2016), to investigate global patterns of life-forms and functions (Díaz et al., 2016) or to assess the vulnerability of species to environmental changes (Bohm et al., 2016; Pacifici et al., 2015; Pearson et al., 2014).”