Abstract
The extent to which species can balance out the loss of suitable habitats due to climate warming by shifting their ranges is an area of controversy. Here, we assess whether highly efficient wind-dispersed organisms like bryophytes can keep-up with projected shifts in their areas of suitable climate. Using a hybrid statistical-mechanistic approach accounting for spatial and temporal variations in both climatic and wind conditions, we simulate future migrations across Europe for 40 bryophyte species until 2050. The median ratios between predicted range loss vs expansion by 2050 across species and climate change scenarios range from 1.6 to 3.3 when only shifts in climatic suitability were considered, but increase to 34.7–96.8 when species dispersal abilities are added to our models. This highlights the importance of accounting for dispersal restrictions when projecting future distribution ranges and suggests that even highly dispersive organisms like bryophytes are not equipped to fully track the rates of ongoing climate change in the course of the next decades.
Highlights
The extent to which species can balance out the loss of suitable habitats due to climate warming by shifting their ranges is an area of controversy
The climatic suitability models exhibited high average True Skill Statistics (TSS) and Area Under The Curve (AUC) of a ROC plot (Receiver Operating Characteristics) statistics[30] of 0.78 ± 0.12 and 0.93 ± 0.05 respectively, when models were evaluated against test sets corresponding to 20% of the data
These models did not show any apparent signature of overfitting, as only a very slight increase in AUC and TSS (0.81 ± 0.13 and 0.94 ± 0.05, respectively) was observed when these statistics were computed at the level of the entire dataset (Supplementary Table 1)
Summary
The extent to which species can balance out the loss of suitable habitats due to climate warming by shifting their ranges is an area of controversy. The median ratios between predicted range loss vs expansion by 2050 across species and climate change scenarios range from 1.6 to 3.3 when only shifts in climatic suitability were considered, but increase to 34.7–96.8 when species dispersal abilities are added to our models This highlights the importance of accounting for dispersal restrictions when projecting future distribution ranges and suggests that even highly dispersive organisms like bryophytes are not equipped to fully track the rates of ongoing climate change in the course of the decades. While the coincident increase of species richness with climate warming towards high elevations is suggestive of a rapid response of communities to climate change[12], considerable lags in the future response to climate warming have been predicted for Alpine plants[13]. Such lag has been observed in the field: Rumpf et al.[14] recently reported that 38% of plant species they investigated were not able to colonize all the sites that became climatically suitable to them
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
