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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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One hundred new species of lichenized fungi : a signature of undiscovered global diversity

H. Thorsten Lumbsch, +103 more
- 18 Feb 2011 - 
TL;DR: A total of 100 new species of lichenized fungi are described, representing a wide taxonomic and geographic range, and emphasizing the dire need for taxonomic expertise in lichenology.
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Rapid upslope shifts in New Guinean birds illustrate strong distributional responses of tropical montane species to global warming

TL;DR: That tropical species appear to be strong responders to climate change has global conservation implications and provides empirical support to hitherto untested models that predict widespread extinctions in upper-elevation tropical endemics with small ranges.
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Predicting the future of forests in the Mediterranean under climate change, with niche- and process-based models: CO2 matters!

TL;DR: In this article, the authors compared two commonly used modeling approaches (niche-and process-based models) to project the future of current stands of three forest species with contrasting distributions, using regionalized climate for continental Spain.
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Assessing the vulnerability of agricultural land use and species to climate change and the role of policy in facilitating adaptation

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discussed the issues relevant to climate change impacts on agriculture and species, and used outputs from models to assess the vulnerability of fanners and species to climate and socioeconomic change by estimating their sensitivity and capacity to adapt to external factors as a means of identifying what causes the differences in their vulnerability.
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A new method for dealing with residual spatial autocorrelation in species distribution models

TL;DR: In this paper, an extension to the autologistic approach by calculating the autocovariate on spatial autocorrelation in residuals (the RAC approach) is proposed.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

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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

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Journal ArticleDOI

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Book

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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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