Abstract
BackgroundAmong the most widely anticipated climate-related impacts to biodiversity are geographic range shifts, whereby species shift their spatial distribution in response to changing climate conditions. In particular, a series of commonly articulated hypotheses have emerged: species are expected to shift their distributions to higher latitudes, greater elevations, and deeper depths in response to climate change, reflecting an underlying hypothesis that species will move to cooler locations to track spatial changes in the temperature of their current range. Yet, many species are not demonstrating range shifts consistent with these hypotheses. Resolving this discrepancy and providing effective explanations for the observed variability in species’ range shifts is urgently needed to help support a range of natural resource management decisions. Here, we propose a protocol to review the body of evidence for commonly-held climate change range shift hypotheses at the species level focusing on observed latitudinal, longitudinal, elevational, and depth shifts in response to temperature and precipitation changes. We aim to answer the question: what is the impact of anthropogenic climate change (specifically changes in temperature and precipitation) on species ranges?MethodsIn this review protocol, we propose to conduct a systematic search of literature from internet databases and search engines in English. Articles will be screened in a two-stage process (title/abstract and full text) to evaluate whether they meet a list of eligibility criteria (e.g., presents species-level data, compares > 1 time period). Initial data coding and extraction will be completed by four reviewers and checked by a secondary reviewer from among our co-authors. We will perform a formal meta-analysis to document estimated effect size using the subset of available range-shift data expressed in distance per time (e.g., km/decade). We will also use multinomial logistic regression models to assess the probability that species are shifting in a direction that supports our hypotheses (i.e. towards higher latitudes, greater elevations, and deeper depths). We will account for study methodology as a potential source of variation.
Highlights
Among the most widely anticipated climate-related impacts to biodiversity are geographic range shifts, whereby species shift their spatial distribution in response to changing climate conditions
There are two prominent range shift hypotheses [15]:(i) in response to rising temperatures, species will shift their ranges poleward to higher latitudes, upslope to higher elevations, and to greater depths [3, 4]; and (ii) in response to changing precipitation patterns, species will shift their ranges to stay within preferred precipitation envelopes [11, 16, 17]
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Summary
This systematic review protocol follows the guidelines of Collaboration for Environmental Evidence and complies with the ROSES reporting standards. As a few relevant articles chosen based on the author team’s previous knowledge of the literature (35 articles total; see Additional file 2 for complete list) that were all successfully returned in the Web of Science, Scopus, and/ or Google Scholar search results. We will extract data from studies into our table in five general categories: (i) basic information about the study (i.e., study duration, study location, species names and taxonomic grouping/information) (see [5, 6]); (ii) information about the climate drivers considered in the study (i.e., the specific temperature and/or precipitation variable considered, the direction of the observed change or trend, and whether or not statistical significance with the climate driver was assessed); (iii) information about the type of range-shift observation described in the study (e.g., latitude/longitude/elevation/depth, shift in occupancy or abundance, leading/trailing edge) [5]; (iv) description of the shift (categorical and quantitative assessment); and (v) any observations or details on species’ vulnerability (i.e. authors’ considerations of exposure to climatic and non-climatic drivers, as well as species’ sensitivity to and adaptive capacity). These results will clarify the robustness of our overall approach, and will provide insight to future research efforts as to the impact of methodological choices on quantitative outcomes
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