Abstract
Predictive frameworks of climate change extinction risk generally focus on the magnitude of climate change a species is expected to experience and the potential for that species to track suitable climate. A species' risk of extinction from climate change will depend, in part, on the magnitude of climate change the species experiences, its exposure. However, exposure is only one component of risk. A species' risk of extinction will also depend on its intrinsic ability to tolerate changing climate, its sensitivity. We examine exposure and sensitivity individually for two example taxa, terrestrial amphibians and mammals. We examine how these factors are related among species and across regions and how explicit consideration of each component of risk may affect predictions of climate change impacts. We find that species' sensitivities to climate change are not congruent with their exposures. Many highly sensitive species face low exposure to climate change and many highly exposed species are relatively insensitive. Separating sensitivity from exposure reveals patterns in the causes and drivers of species' extinction risk that may not be evident solely from predictions of climate change. Our findings emphasise the importance of explicitly including sensitivity and exposure to climate change in assessments of species' extinction risk.
Highlights
Predictive frameworks of climate change extinction risk generally focus on the magnitude of climate change a species is expected to experience and the potential for that species to track suitable climate
Species’ climate breadth was only weakly positively correlated with exposure values. This finding was robust across all four relative concentration pathways (RCPs)
Regions or species where high sensitivity and high exposure to climate change co-occur would be expected to have a high level of extinction risk
Summary
Predictive frameworks of climate change extinction risk generally focus on the magnitude of climate change a species is expected to experience and the potential for that species to track suitable climate. We examine exposure and sensitivity individually for two example taxa, terrestrial amphibians and mammals We examine how these factors are related among species and across regions and how explicit consideration of each component of risk may affect predictions of climate change impacts. Climate change is a global anthropogenic threat and is expected to lead to shifts in the geographic distributions of species, ecological communities and even biomes This global impact is already being seen, with shifts in species’ distributions and life history timings evident from every continent and ocean and across most major taxonomic groups[1]. Whilst the magnitude of climate change a species experiences is undoubtedly an important component of its overall risk, the effects of a given level of exposure will be moderated by each species’ intrinsic biological capability to withstand climate change, its sensitivity[5,7,10]. Understanding patterns in sensitivity to climate change and the extent to which high sensitivity and high exposure occur in the same species and regions is likely to be even more critical to predicting patterns in climate change extinction risk than for other threats[5,10]
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