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Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

Extinction risk from climate change

TLDR
Estimates of extinction risks for sample regions that cover some 20% of the Earth's terrestrial surface show the importance of rapid implementation of technologies to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and strategies for carbon sequestration.
Abstract
Climate change over the past approximately 30 years has produced numerous shifts in the distributions and abundances of species and has been implicated in one species-level extinction. Using projections of species' distributions for future climate scenarios, we assess extinction risks for sample regions that cover some 20% of the Earth's terrestrial surface. Exploring three approaches in which the estimated probability of extinction shows a power-law relationship with geographical range size, we predict, on the basis of mid-range climate-warming scenarios for 2050, that 15-37% of species in our sample of regions and taxa will be 'committed to extinction'. When the average of the three methods and two dispersal scenarios is taken, minimal climate-warming scenarios produce lower projections of species committed to extinction ( approximately 18%) than mid-range ( approximately 24%) and maximum-change ( approximately 35%) scenarios. These estimates show the importance of rapid implementation of technologies to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and strategies for carbon sequestration.

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Seed bank persistence and climate change

TL;DR: In this paper, a review of the potential impact of changing temperature, rainfall and fire regimes on the longevity of long-term persistent seed-banks is presented. But, there are few studies investigating the mechanistic responses of demographic processes such as seed-bank dynamics to forecast climate change.
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Thermal biases and vulnerability to warming in the world’s marine fauna

TL;DR: It is found that most shallow water marine species occupy broad thermal distributions that are aggregated in either temperate or tropical realms, which result in ocean-scale spatial thermal biases, where communities are dominated by species with warmer or cooler affinity than local environmental temperatures.
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A 250-year index of first flowering dates and its response to temperature changes

TL;DR: A 250-year index of first flowering dates for 405 plant species in the UK for assessing the impact of climate change on plant communities is derived, demonstrating how multi-species, multiple-site phenological events can be integrated to obtain indices showing trends for each species and across species.
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Conservation ecology of bees: populations, species and communities

TL;DR: The role of ecology in bee conservation at the levels of species, populations and communities is reviewed and ecological data will be central to integrating management strategies into a broader, landscape scale of dynamic, interconnected habitats capable of delivering bee conservation in the context of global environmental change.
Journal ArticleDOI

Contextualizing avian mortality: A preliminary appraisal of bird and bat fatalities from wind, fossil-fuel, and nuclear electricity

TL;DR: In this paper, the threats that wind farms pose to birds and bats are explored, and an approximate calculation for the number of birds killed per kWh generated for wind electricity, fossil fuel, and nuclear power systems is presented.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities

TL;DR: A ‘silver bullet’ strategy on the part of conservation planners, focusing on ‘biodiversity hotspots’ where exceptional concentrations of endemic species are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat, is proposed.
Journal ArticleDOI

Climate change 2001: the scientific basis

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an overview of the climate system and its dynamics, including observed climate variability and change, the carbon cycle, atmospheric chemistry and greenhouse gases, and their direct and indirect effects.
Journal ArticleDOI

A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems

TL;DR: A diagnostic fingerprint of temporal and spatial ‘sign-switching’ responses uniquely predicted by twentieth century climate trends is defined and generates ‘very high confidence’ (as laid down by the IPCC) that climate change is already affecting living systems.
Book

Species Diversity in Space and Time

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a hierarchical dynamic puzzle to understand the relationship between habitat diversity and species diversity and the evolution of the relationships between habitats diversity and diversity in evolutionary time.
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