A technique for detecting and attributing changes in species distributions to climate change over time

Abstract

The global climate has changed substantially over the last 100 years, and associated changes in species distribution limits have occurred in recent decades. Climate change presents a challenge for biodiversity conservation on a global scale. The ability to detect changes in species distributions and attribute them to past climate change is crucial for the accurate prediction of future species distributions and for biodiversity conservation. This study proposes a technique for the quantitative detection of species distribution changes and their attribution to past climate change. An attribution value was defined to describe the extent to which the distributional changes for observed species could be attributed to climate change. The calculation thereof involved the following steps: (1) construction of a time series of observed species distributions and climatic factors, (2) estimation of the correlations between changes in species distributions and climatic factors, (3) prediction of changes in species distributions as driven by climatic factors, (4) estimation of the consistency between observed and predicted changes in species distributions, and (5) estimation of the attribution value. Furthermore, using nine snake species found in China as examples, we demonstrated in detail the practical application of this technique. This technique can be used to identify, based on global species distribution and climate data, the effects of climate change on species distributions over the past years on a global scale.