Extinction risk controlled by interaction of long-term and short-term climate change.

Gregor H. Mathes,Jeroen van Dijk,Manuel J. Steinbauer,Wolfgang Kiessling

doi:10.1038/s41559-020-01377-w

Gregor H. Mathes, Jeroen van Dijk + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01377-w

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Abstract

Assessing extinction risk from climate drivers is a major goal of conservation science. Few studies, however, include a long-term perspective of climate change. Without explicit integration, such long-term temperature trends and their interactions with short-term climate change may be so dominant that they blur or even reverse the apparent direct relationship between climate change and extinction. Here we evaluate how observed genus-level extinctions of arthropods, bivalves, cnidarians, echinoderms, foraminifera, gastropods, mammals and reptiles in the geological past can be predicted from the interaction of long-term temperature trends with short-term climate change. We compare synergistic palaeoclimate interaction (a short-term change on top of a long-term trend in the same direction) to antagonistic palaeoclimate interaction such as long-term cooling followed by short-term warming. Synergistic palaeoclimate interaction increases extinction risk by up to 40%. The memory of palaeoclimate interaction including the climate history experienced by ancestral lineages can be up to 60 Myr long. The effect size of palaeoclimate interaction is similar to other key factors such as geographic range, abundance or clade membership. Insights arising from this previously unknown driver of extinction risk might attenuate recent predictions of climate-change-induced biodiversity loss.

Highlights

Current anthropogenic warming occurs after a 40 million year cooling trend, raising the possibility that many modern clades are increasingly exposed to climates they experienced during their origination
Palaeoclimate interactions improved model performance in 7 out of 8 clades when compared to models including short-term temperature changes only, based on Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC) (Fig. 2)
Short-term climate change adding to a previous temperature trend in the same direction increased extinction risk in all significant models (Fig. 3, Extended Data 1)

Summary

Introduction

Biodiversity and ecosystems are critically endangered by current climate change[1,2]. Current anthropogenic warming occurs after a 40 million year cooling trend, raising the possibility that many modern clades are increasingly exposed to climates they experienced during their origination. Understanding the effect of this palaeoclimate interaction could provide crucial insights into extinction mechanisms and lead to improved mitigation efforts for biodiversity under current climate change. We estimated the temporal memory of this effect We compared these models containing information about both long-term temperature trends and short-term changes to models including shortterm temperature changes only using model selection[20]

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Conclusion