Abstract
Climate change seriously threatens biodiversity, particularly in mountain ecosystems. However, studies on climate change effects rarely consider endemic species and their niche properties. Using species distribution models, we assessed the impact of climate change on the endemic flora of the richest centre of endemism in the Alps: the South-Western Alps. We projected the potential distributions of 100 taxa under both an optimistic (RCP2.6) and a pessimistic (RCP8.5) climate scenario, analysing the relationships between range dynamics and several predictors (dispersal abilities, vegetation belts, niche marginality, niche breadth, altitudinal range and present range). The negative impact ranged from weak to severe according to the scenario, but the extinction risk was low. The dispersal abilities of species strongly affected these range dynamics. Colline and subalpine species were the most threatened and the relationship between range dynamics and predictors varied among vegetation belts. Our results suggest that the rough topography of the SW Alps will probably buffer the climate change effects on endemics, especially if climate will remain within the limits already experienced by species during the Holocene. The presence of the Mediterranean-mountain flora, less affected by climate change than the alpine one, may explain the lower number of species threatened by extinction in the SW Alps than in other European mountains. These results suggest that the relationship between plants’ sensitivity to climate change, and both niche properties and vegetation belts, depends on the difference between the current climate in which species grow and the future climate, and not just on their niche breadth.
Highlights
It is widely accepted that global warming is inducing one of the greatest threats to biodiversity (Thomas et al 2004; Bellard et al 2012; Cahill et al 2012; Moritz and Agudo 2013; Sax et al 2013)
The uncertainty in the model projection was mainly low for all species and it was slightly higher in the pessimistic than in the optimistic scenario (Online Resources 4)
In this study on the effect of climate change on 100 endemic species in the SW Alps, we showed that if the climate change stays within the limits already experienced by species during the Holocene, the range loss will be moderate
Summary
It is widely accepted that global warming is inducing one of the greatest threats to biodiversity (Thomas et al 2004; Bellard et al 2012; Cahill et al 2012; Moritz and Agudo 2013; Sax et al 2013). Mountain ecosystems are important centres of biodiversity where species and ecosystems at risk persist (Nogués-Bravo et al 2007; Hoorn et al 2018) and are exposed to climate change effects, even if their vulnerability is highly variable among mountain systems (Engler et al 2011). Studies aiming to provide an overview of the effect of climate change on mountain species have mainly addressed widely distributed taxa while the few available overview studies focusing on endemic species have taken into account an array of different endemics and not mainly mountain ones We still lack a general understanding of the effect of future climate change on mountain endemic species
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