Detecting range shifts among Australian fishes in response to climate change

By D. Booth, N. Bond, Peter I. Macreadie. 2011

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One of the most obvious and expected impacts of climate change is a shift in the distributional range of organisms, which could have considerable ecological and economic consequences. Australian waters are hotspots for climate-induced environmental changes; here, we review these potential changes and their apparent and potential implications for freshwater, estuarine and marine fish. Our meta-analysis detected ,300 papers globally on 'fish' and 'range shifts', with ,7% being from Australia. Of the Australian papers, only one study exhibited definitive evidence of climate-induced range shifts, with most studies focussing instead on future predictions. There was little consensus in the literature regarding the definition of 'range', largely because of populations having distributions that fluctuate regularly. For example, many marine populations have broad dispersal of offspring (causing vagrancy). Similarly, in freshwater and estuarine systems, regular environmental changes (e.g. seasonal, ENSO cycles - not related to climate change) cause expansion and contraction of populations, which confounds efforts to detect range 'shifts'. We found that increases in water temperature, reduced freshwater flows and changes in ocean currents are likely to be the key drivers of climate- induced range shifts in Australian fishes. Although large-scale frequent and rigorous direct surveys of fishes across their entiredistributionalranges,especiallyatrangeedges,willbeessentialtodetectrangeshiftsoffishesinresponsetoclimate change, we suggest careful co-opting of fisheries, museum and other regional databases as a potential, but imperfect alternative.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e7dcdcc9a6bd2242903a063d8dbdadfd1b6e7b82

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Citations in the corpus

Defining and observing stages of climate-mediated range shifts in marine systems (2014, background): “indicative of the first stage of a range extension (Booth et al., 2011; Last et al., 2011).”
Using species distribution models to infer potential climate change-induced range shifts of freshwater fish in south-eastern Australia (2011, methodology): “…cons of using SDMs to predict range shifts Much of the discussion of possible climate-change impacts on species distributions in Australia has been based on relatively simple qualitative assessments of existing observational and experimental data (e.g. Morrongiello et al. 2011; Booth et al. 2011).”
Latitudinal shifts in coral reef fishes: why some species do and others do not shift (2014, background): “There is increasing evidence that climate change is leading to rapid changes in marine species’ distributional envelope, with such range shifts expected to increase in strength and intensity as global climatic conditions change (Booth et al. 2011; Madin et al. 2012).”
Climate change and its implications for Australia's freshwater fish (2011, background): “2007) will increase the risk of the thermal tolerances of fish being exceeded in the small refuge-pool habitats typical throughout the south-west (Davies 2010), which could result in southerly contractions of the region’s fish fauna (Booth et al. 2011).”