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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

Global priority areas for ecosystem restoration

Bernardo B. N. Strassburg, +43 more
- 14 Oct 2020 - 
TL;DR: It is found that restoring 15% of converted lands in priority areas could avoid 60% of expected extinctions while sequestering 299 gigatonnes of CO 2 —30% of the total CO 2 increase in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
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Direct impacts of recent climate warming on insect populations.

TL;DR: The key impacts of global warming on insect development and dispersal are reviewed, including earlier flight periods, enhanced winter survival and acceleration of development rates are the major insect responses.
Journal ArticleDOI

Impacts of climate warming and habitat loss on extinctions at species' low‐latitude range boundaries

TL;DR: In this article, the authors surveyed the four species of butterflies that reach their southern limits in Britain and found that the southern/warm range margins of some species are as sensitive to climate change as are northern/cool margins.
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Eco-evolutionary conservation biology: contemporary evolution and the dynamics of persistence

TL;DR: An eco-evolutionary perspective suggests that the focus is expanded beyond the acute problems of threatened populations and growing invasions, to consider how contemporary evolutionary mechanics contribute to such problems in the first place or affect their resolution.
Journal ArticleDOI

Assessing the effects of pseudo-absences on predictive distribution model performance

TL;DR: In this article, the authors compared seven procedures to generate pseudo-absence data, which in turn were used to generate GLM-logistic regressed models when reliable absence data are not available.
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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