Abstract
Climate change is a matter of worldwide concern with severe predicted impacts on biodiversity. Here, we analysed the potential impacts of current and future climates on aquatic true bugs (Heteroptera) in relation to their distribution patterns and ecological preferences (based on a database generated from existing literature references and field collections). We considered the traits as ‘species thermal range’ and ‘emergence period’ to evaluate the future climate change impacts on the distributions of aquatic true bugs in the riverine regions of a tropical biodiversity hotspot, the Western Ghats of India. We used Species Distribution Models (SDMs) to evaluate the potential impacts of climate change on the distributions of aquatic true bugs. We modelled the distributions of twenty-six species of aquatic true bugs using different modelling tools through a carefully examined set of occurrence records to generate potential present distributions and to project these distributions into future scenarios of climate change. We observed increasing/decreasing range sizes of the species in the current and future scenarios. We found losses and increases of species' ranges in some regions, but not much variation in species richness. Similarly, no significant effect was observed in the distribution ranges for species with different duration of emergence period and thermal range in current and future climatic scenarios. Losses and gains in species richness would be concentrated in the mountainous area of the Western Ghats, whereas loss of species and the bigger difference between current and future richness will occur in the adjacent lowlands and towards central regions, including the network of protected areas of the Western Ghats. These areas are critical to buffer regional species loss in the future.Implications for insect conservationGiven the importance of aquatic true bugs as bioindicators and biological control agents, monitoring their range shifts should be routinely addressed in the conservation contexts of the Western Ghats.
Highlights
Climate change is projected to become one of the most predominant drivers of biodiversity change by the end of this century (IPCC 2013)
The generated database of aquatic true bugs we used in this study is from a poorly-studied tropical biodiversity hotspot, the Western Ghats of peninsular India
Some species (n = 9) showed distribution ranges decreasing from the current to the future scenarios (e.g. A. barbatus, A. s. sardeus, C. asiaticus, C. productus, D. molestus, H. rotundatus, L. maculatus, M. communis, and M. s. scutellaris)
Summary
Climate change is projected to become one of the most predominant drivers of biodiversity change by the end of this century (IPCC 2013). The knowledge of climate change impacts on aquatic insects is poorly developed, based on findings from biodiversity hotspots (Hering et al 2009; Sundar et al 2020). It is expected that global warming will affect aquatic insects in many ways, ranging from changes in their distributions to local, regional, and global extinctions (Cardoso et al 2020). Our capability to predict the effect of climate change on different aquatic insect groups, based on field data, is variable. Considering the significant threat posed by mosquitoes to human health, the relationships between climate change and these aquatic insects are perhaps the best studied, in both experimental and modelling work, and current knowledge suggests that the ranges of mosquito-borne diseases could expand dramatically in response to climate change (Reiter 2001). Despite the increasing availability of digitized information on biodiversity data and species occurrence records
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