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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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Adaptation, migration or extirpation: climate change outcomes for tree populations

TL;DR: As all tree species will be suffering lags, interspecific competition may weaken, facilitating persistence under suboptimal conditions, and species with small populations, fragmented ranges, low fecundity, or suffering declines due to introduced insects or diseases should be candidates for facilitated migration.
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Five (or so) challenges for species distribution modelling

TL;DR: Five areas of enquiry are identified and discussed that are of high importance for species distribution modelling: clarification of the niche concept; improved designs for sampling data for building models; improved parameterization; improved model selection and predictor contribution; and improved model evaluation.

Widespread amphibian extinctions from epidemic disease driven by global

TL;DR: In this article, a recent mass extinction associated with pathogen outbreaks is tied to global warming, and the timing of losses in relation to changes in sea surface and air temperatures is analyzed.
Journal ArticleDOI

Biodiversity management in the face of climate change: A review of 22 years of recommendations

TL;DR: The authors systematically reviewed the literature to explore what potential solutions it has identified and what consensus and direction it provides to cope with climate change, and synthesize recommendations with respect to three likely conservation pathways: regional planning, site-scale management, and modification of existing conservation plans.
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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