Joint Effects of Marine Intrusion and Climate Change on the Mexican Avifauna

Abstract

Changing climates are affecting biodiversity and natural systems, causing extinctions, range shifts, and phenological shifts. Efforts to forecast the spatial distribution and magnitude of these effects, however, have focused largely on direct effects of changing climates on species’ distributional potential; recent work has considered secondary effects of warming climates via rising sea levels. Here, we present a first integration of the two dimensions of climate change effects on biodiversity, examining joint effects of marine intrusion and climate change on the distributional potential of seventy-six species of Mexican birds. The two phenomena are not related to one another—that is, a species seriously affected by one is not necessarily seriously affected by the other; however, the areas affected within species’ distributions by the two phenomena tend to be complementary, compounding the negative effects. These results have implications for planning biodiversity conservation globally.