Abstract
Climate change is contributing to the widespread redistribution, and increasingly the loss, of species. Geographical range shifts among many species were detected rapidly after predictions of the potential importance of climate change were specified 35 years ago: species are shifting their ranges towards the poles and often to higher elevations in mountainous areas. Early tests of these predictions were largely qualitative, though extraordinarily rapid and broadly based, and statistical tests distinguishing between climate change and other global change drivers provided quantitative evidence that climate change had already begun to cause species’ geographical ranges to shift. I review two mechanisms enabling this process, namely development of approaches for accounting for dispersal that contributes to range expansion, and identification of factors that alter persistence and lead to range loss. Dispersal in the context of range expansion depends on an array of processes, like population growth rates in novel environments, rates of individual species movements to new locations, and how quickly areas of climatically tolerable habitat shift. These factors can be tied together in well-understood mathematical frameworks or modelled statistically, leading to better prediction of extinction risk as climate changes. Yet, species' increasing exposures to novel climate conditions can exceed their tolerances and raise the likelihood of local extinction and consequent range losses. Such losses are the consequence of processes acting on individuals, driven by factors, such as the growing frequency and severity of extreme weather, that contribute local extinction risks for populations and species. Many mechanisms can govern how species respond to climate change, and rapid progress in global change research creates many opportunities to inform policy and improve conservation outcomes in the early stages of the sixth mass extinction.
Highlights
Human activities have caused extinction rates to rise sharply among populations and species in most regions of the world [1,2,3]
The rapidity of human-caused climate change has led to widespread biotic responses, which demonstrate the pervasive influences—and risks—of climate change on the life histories of species
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 resurveyed populations extinct (%). The detection of such shifts and even their attribution to climate change is still a vital step removed from establishing quantitative relationships with range dynamics or understanding the mechanisms underlying such relationships [38]
Summary
Human activities have caused extinction rates to rise sharply among populations and species in most regions of the world [1,2,3]. The establishment of populations in new areas is limited by, among other things, species’ dispersal and persistence capacities in particular environments over both short and longer time frames [22,23] Both processes—dispersal and persistence—are vital to understanding range dynamics during climate change. Models measured success if they detected species’ range shifts in directions that were qualitatively consistent with climate change effects, while new research links species’ extinction–colonization dynamics to highly resolved measurements of climate change and consequent short-term environmental variability These 2 developments lead to practical policy advice that could alter the trajectory of extinction rates
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