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
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Patterns, Causes, and Consequences of Anthropocene Defaunation
TL;DR: Slowing defaunation will require aggressively reducing animal overexploitation and habitat destruction; mitigating climate disruption; and stabilizing the impacts of human population growth and uneven resource consumption.
Journal ArticleDOI
Experimental evidence for the effects of dung beetle functional group richness and composition on ecosystem function in a tropical forest.
TL;DR: Overall, both dung and seed removal increased with dung beetle functional group richness, however, levels of ecosystem functioning were idiosyncratic depending on the identity of the functional groups present, indicating an important role for functional group composition.
Journal ArticleDOI
Why is the choice of future climate scenarios for species distribution modelling important
TL;DR: This paper provides bioclimatic modellers with an overview of emissions scenarios and climate models, discusses uncertainty surrounding projections of future climate and suggests steps that can be taken to reduce and communicate climate scenario-related uncertainty in assessments of future species responses to climate change.
Journal ArticleDOI
Consequences of spatial autocorrelation for niche-based models
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explored the bias introduced by spatial autocorrelation on the explanatory and predictive power of species' distribution models, and made recommendations for dealing with the problem.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Mechanistic Approach for Modeling Temperature‐Dependent Consumer‐Resource Dynamics
David A. Vasseur,Kevin S. McCann +1 more
TL;DR: This work addresses problems of tractability and plausibility in community/environment models by incorporating the Boltzmann factor (temperature dependence) in a bioenergetic consumer‐resource framework and leads to three predictions for the response of consumer‐ resource systems to increasing mean temperature (warming).
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities
Norman Myers,Russell A. Mittermeier,Cristina G. Mittermeier,Gustavo A. B. da Fonseca,Jennifer Kent +4 more
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
John Theodore Houghton,Y. Ding,David John Griggs,M. Noguer,P. J. van der Linden,X. Dai,K. Maskell,C. A. Johnson +7 more
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
Camille Parmesan,Gary W. Yohe +1 more
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.
Journal ArticleDOI
Global biodiversity scenarios for the year 2100.
Osvaldo E. Sala,F. S. Chapin,Juan J. Armesto,Eric L. Berlow,Janine Bloomfield,Rodolfo Dirzo,E Huber-Sanwald,Laura Foster Huenneke,Robert B. Jackson,Ann P. Kinzig,Rik Leemans,David M. Lodge,Harold A. Mooney,Martín Oesterheld,N L Poff,Martin T. Sykes,Brian Walker,Marilyn D. Walker,Diana H. Wall +18 more
TL;DR: This study identified a ranking of the importance of drivers of change, aranking of the biomes with respect to expected changes, and the major sources of uncertainties in projections of future biodiversity change.
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.