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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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Journal ArticleDOI

Species-area relationships explained by the joint effects of dispersal limitation and habitat heterogeneity.

TL;DR: It is suggested that heterogeneous habitat and dispersal limitation are two predominant mechanisms for maintaining the spatial distributions of the species in these two forests.
MonographDOI

Birds and Climate Change: Impacts and Conservation Responses

TL;DR: A review of the existing impacts of climate change on birds, including changes in the timing of migration and breeding and effects on bird populations around the world can be found in this article.
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Conservation and climate change: Assessing the vulnerability of snow leopard habitat to treeline shift in the Himalaya

TL;DR: In this article, a hybrid approach to climate-adaptive conservation landscape planning for snow leopards in the Himalayan Mountains was developed. But, the authors did not consider the impact of climate change on the distribution of snow leopard habitat and linkages.
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Water links the historical and contemporary components of the Australian bird diversity gradient

TL;DR: The contemporary bird richness gradient contains a historical signal and reflects the effects of both current levels of water availability as well as changes in rainfall patterns extending over evolutionary time.
Journal ArticleDOI

Combining static and dynamic variables in species distribution models under climate change

TL;DR: The results demonstrate the importance of including static and dynamic non-climate variables in addition to climate variables in species distribution models designed to predict future change in a species' habitat or distribution as a result of climate change.
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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