Quantifying Heatwaves’ Contemporary Association with Continental Biodiversity

Abstract

In recent years, extreme high temperature events have created great threat to humanity and socio-economy. However, a comprehensive evaluation on the degrees to which ecosystems are affected by heatwaves is yet to be fully resolved and becomes a hot-spot in climate and ecological research. This study aims to quantify the relationship between global heatwave occurrence and environmental indicators such as continental biodiversity quantified by the Living Planet Index, thereby generating a way to understand the extent to which future heatwaves may impact the planet. Analyzing global meteorological data from the last 43 years (1980-2022), heatwave definition is standardized to daily maximum temperatures over the 90th percentile (threshold), with a consecutive occurrence of at least three days, in the 1981-2010 climatological period. A significantly strong, negative correlation (coefficient of determination=0.766) between the occurrence of the standardized heatwave and continental biodiversity is established through Pearson correlation analysis and linear regression, followed by Student-t test. This research provides the scientific community a better comprehension to the variability of heatwaves during the past decades over global continental regions. Through diagnosing the heatwave-biodiversity relationship and the underlying mechanism of how extreme temperature events impact ecosystems, this research will shed light on a better solution to alleviate the impact of heatwaves on biodiversity, or better, to alleviate global warming purposefully.