Impacts of climate warming on terrestrial ectotherms across latitude.
Curtis Deutsch,Joshua J. Tewksbury,Raymond B. Huey,Kimberly S. Sheldon,Cameron K. Ghalambor,David C. Haak,Paul R. Martin,Paul R. Martin +7 more
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The results show that warming in the tropics, although relatively small in magnitude, is likely to have the most deleterious consequences because tropical insects are relatively sensitive to temperature change and are currently living very close to their optimal temperature, so that warming may even enhance their fitness.Abstract:
The impact of anthropogenic climate change on terrestrial organisms is often predicted to increase with latitude, in parallel with the rate of warming. Yet the biological impact of rising temperatures also depends on the physiological sensitivity of organisms to temperature change. We integrate empirical fitness curves describing the thermal tolerance of terrestrial insects from around the world with the projected geographic distribution of climate change for the next century to estimate the direct impact of warming on insect fitness across latitude. The results show that warming in the tropics, although relatively small in magnitude, is likely to have the most deleterious consequences because tropical insects are relatively sensitive to temperature change and are currently living very close to their optimal temperature. In contrast, species at higher latitudes have broader thermal tolerance and are living in climates that are currently cooler than their physiological optima, so that warming may even enhance their fitness. Available thermal tolerance data for several vertebrate taxa exhibit similar patterns, suggesting that these results are general for terrestrial ectotherms. Our analyses imply that, in the absence of ameliorating factors such as migration and adaptation, the greatest extinction risks from global warming may be in the tropics, where biological diversity is also greatest.read more
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Exposure to a heat wave under food limitation makes an agricultural insecticide lethal: a mechanistic laboratory experiment
TL;DR: The results indicate the importance of delayed effects in shaping the total fitness impact of a heat wave when followed by pesticide exposure and provides a novel explanation for the poorly understood potential of heat waves and of sublethal pesticide concentrations to cause mass mortality.
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The in situ light microenvironment of corals
Daniel Wangpraseurt,Lubos Polerecky,Lubos Polerecky,Anthony W. D. Larkum,Peter J. Ralph,Daniel A. Nielsen,Mathieu Pernice,Mathieu Pernice,Michael Kühl,Michael Kühl,Michael Kühl +10 more
TL;DR: A novel diver-operated microsensor system was used to collect in situ spectrally resolved light fields on corals with a micrometer spatial resolution, indicating an important role of benthos optics for coral ecophysiology.
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Environmental Warming and Biodiversity-Ecosystem Functioning in Freshwater Microcosms: Partitioning the Effects of Species Identity, Richness and Metabolism
Daniel M. Perkins,Brendan G. McKie,Björn Malmqvist,Steven G. Gilmour,Julia Reiss,Guy Woodward +5 more
TL;DR: The authors investigated the capacity for assemblages of three freshwater invertebrate consumer species (Asellus aquaticus, Nemoura cinerea and Sericostoma personatum) from temperate (southern England) and boreal (northern Sweden) regions to respond to expected shifts in temperature and basal resources, and quantified rates of a key ecosystem process (leaf-litter decomposition).
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Assisted colonization as a climate change adaptation tool
TL;DR: A series of scenarios that may predispose terrestrial species to the need for assisted colonization in order to reduce extinction risk resulting from anthropogenic climate change are identified and a list of traits commonly associated with at-risk species are assembled to provide broad-scale guidance on how to select species to target as a conservation management response to climate change.
Journal ArticleDOI
Coarse climate change projections for species living in a fine‐scaled world
TL;DR: A framework that partitions climate into three important components: trend, variance, and autocorrelation is developed and provides one way to identify where improving the resolution of climate data will have the largest impact on the accuracy of biological predictions under climate change.
References
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