Abstract
There are widespread concerns that anthropogenic climate change will become a major cause of global biodiversity loss. However, the potential impact of climate change on the extinction risk of species remains poorly understood, particularly in comparison to other current threats. The objective of this research was to examine the relative impact of climate change on extinction risk of upper montane tree species in the tropical Andes, an area of high biodiversity value that is particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts. The extinction risk of 129 tree species endemic to the region was evaluated according to the IUCN Red List criteria, both with and without the potential impacts of climate change. Evaluations were supported by development of species distribution models, using three methods (generalized additive models, recursive partitioning, and support vector machines), all of which produced similarly high AUC values when averaged across all species evaluated (0.82, 0.86, and 0.88, respectively). Inclusion of climate change increased the risk of extinction of 18–20% of the tree species evaluated, depending on the climate scenario. The relative impact of climate change was further illustrated by calculating the Red List Index, an indicator that shows changes in the overall extinction risk of sets of species over time. A 15% decline in the Red List Index was obtained when climate change was included in this evaluation. While these results suggest that climate change represents a significant threat to tree species in the tropical Andes, they contradict previous suggestions that climate change will become the most important cause of biodiversity loss in coming decades. Conservation strategies should therefore focus on addressing the multiple threatening processes currently affecting biodiversity, rather than focusing primarily on potential climate change impacts.
Highlights
There is widespread concern that anthropogenic climate change will have significant negative impacts on global biodiversity
While these results suggest that climate change represents a significant threat to tree species in the tropical Andes, they contradict previous suggestions that climate change will become the most important cause of biodiversity loss in coming decades
The current results indicated that climate change increased the risk of extinction of 18–20% tree species evaluated, depending on the climate scenario
Summary
There is widespread concern that anthropogenic climate change will have significant negative impacts on global biodiversity. Experimental and modelling evidence suggests that climate change could lead to major changes in the distribution of species and the composition of PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0131388. Particular concern has focused on the impact of climate change on the risk of extinction of species. Assessments of the potential loss of species as a result of climate change remain highly uncertain, partly because of the wide variety of different approaches that have been used by previous analyses [2, 7]. Similar approaches were used by Malcolm et al [9] in their study of biodiversity hotspots, where projected percent extinctions ranged from
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