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Extinction risk from climate change

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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

The projected effect on insects, vertebrates, and plants of limiting global warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C.

TL;DR: Numbers of species projected to lose >50% of their range are reduced by ~66% in insects and by ~50% in plants and vertebrates when warming is limited to 1.5°C as compared with 2°C.
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Diversity and carbon storage across the tropical forest biome

Martin J. P. Sullivan, +124 more
- 17 Jan 2017 - 
TL;DR: In this article, a pan-tropical dataset of 360 plots located in structurally intact old-growth closed-canopy forest, surveyed using standardised methods, allowing a multi-scale evaluation of diversity-carbon relationships in tropical forests.
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Plantation forests, climate change and biodiversity

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the potential direct and indirect impacts of climate change on plantations and concluded that in the short to medium term changes in plantation management designed to mitigate or adapt to climate change could have a significantly greater impact on biodiversity in such plantations than the direct effects of the climate change.
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Climate, competition and connectivity affect future migration and ranges of European trees

TL;DR: Early-successional species track climate change almost instantaneously while mid- to late- successional species were predicted to migrate very slowly, while re-adjustments of species ranges to climate and land-use change are complex and very individualistic, yet still quite predictable.
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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