Extinction risk from climate change
Chris D. Thomas,Alison Cameron,Rhys E. Green,Rhys E. Green,Michel Bakkenes,Linda J. Beaumont,Yvonne C. Collingham,Barend F.N. Erasmus,Marinez Ferreira de Siqueira,Alan Grainger,Lee Hannah,Lesley Hughes,Brian Huntley,Albert S. van Jaarsveld,Guy F. Midgley,Lera Miles,Lera Miles,Miguel A. Ortega-Huerta,A. Townsend Peterson,Oliver L. Phillips,Stephen E. Williams +20 more
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.read more
Citations
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Ecotypic variation in the context of global climate change: revisiting the rules.
Virginie Millien,S. Kathleen Lyons,Link E. Olson,Felisa A. Smith,Anthony B. Wilson,Yoram Yom-Tov +5 more
TL;DR: This work examines several well-known ecogeographical rules, especially those pertaining to body size in contemporary, historical and fossil taxa, and reviews the evidence showing that rules of geographical variation in response to variation in the local environment can also apply to morphological changes through time in Response to climate change.
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Predicting species distributions: use of climatic parameters in BIOCLIM and its impact on predictions of species’ current and future distributions
TL;DR: This paper investigated how different methods of combining climatic parameters in BIOCLIM influenced predictions of the current distributions of 25 Australian butterflies species, and assessed the extent to which parameter choice influenced prediction of the magnitude and direction of range changes under two climate change scenarios for 2020.
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The ecology of climate change and infectious diseases: reply
TL;DR: While initial projections suggested dramatic future increases in the geographic range of infectious diseases, recent models predict range shifts in disease distributions, with little net increase in area.
Journal ArticleDOI
Habitat, environment and niche: what are we modelling?
TL;DR: The concept of habitat remains associated with descriptive/correlative analyses of the environments of organisms, while the niche concept is reserved for mechanistic analyses as mentioned in this paper, and it is necessary to understand the way an organism's morphology, physiology, and especially behaviour, determine the kinds of environment it experiences when living in a particular habitat, and also how those environmental conditions affect fitness (growth, survival and reproduction).
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A comparative evaluation of presence-only methods for modelling species distribution
TL;DR: Differences among species in predictive accuracy were highly consistent over all modelling methods, indicating the need for a better understanding of the ecological and geographical factors that influence the performance of species distribution models.
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