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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Impacts on terrestrial biodiversity of moving from a 2°C to a 1.5°C target
TL;DR: It is shown that holding warming to 1.5°C versus 2°C can significantly reduce the number of species facing a potential loss of 50% of their climatic range, and further there would be an increase of 5.5–14% of the globe that could potentially act as climatic refugia for plants and animals, an area equivalent to the current global protected area network.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the mechanisms by which climate change will affect future ant invasions and whether their interaction could lead to a synergistic effect, and they described three major modelling approaches used to forecast the future of invasions under climate change: species distribution models, mechanistic models, and coupled models.
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Nutrient limitation constrains thermal tolerance in freshwater phytoplankton
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Heated Relations: Temperature-Mediated Shifts in Consumption across Trophic Levels
Linda I. Seifert,Francisco de Castro,Arnim Marquart,Ursula Gaedke,Guntram Weithoff,Matthijs Vos +5 more
TL;DR: The results exemplify how the relative forces of top-down control exerted by herbivores and carnivores may strongly shift under global warming.
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Gene expression in closely related species mirrors local adaptation: consequences for responses to a warming world
Shawn T. O’Neil,Jason D. K. Dzurisin,Caroline M. Williams,Neil F. Lobo,Jessica K. Higgins,Jillian M. Deines,Rory Carmichael,Erliang Zeng,John C. Tan,Grace C. Wu,Scott J. Emrich,Jessica J. Hellmann +11 more
TL;DR: The results challenge the assumption that species are functionally similar across their ranges and poleward peripheral populations are preadapted to warmer conditions and some taxa deserve population‐level consideration when predicting the effects of climate change because they respond in genetically based, distinctive ways to changing conditions.
References
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