As climate change unfolds over the next century, plants and animals
will need to adapt or shift locations to follow their ideal climate. A new
study provides an innovative global map of where species are likely to succeed
or fail in keeping up with a changing climate. The findings appear in the
science journal Nature.
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As
part of a UC Santa Barbara National Center for Ecological Analysis and
Synthesis (NCEAS) working group, 18 international researchers analyzed 50 years
of sea surface and land temperature data (1960-2009). They also projected
temperature changes under two future scenarios, one that assumes greenhouse gas
emissions are stabilized by 2100 and a second that assumes these emissions
continue to increase. The resulting maps display where new temperature
conditions are being generated and where existing environments may disappear.
This rare global study, which examines scenarios both on land and in
the ocean, demonstrates that climate migration is far more complex than a
simple shift toward the poles. “As species move to track their ideal
temperature conditions, they will sometimes run into what we call a ‘climate
sink,’ where the preferred climate simply disappears leaving species nowhere to
go because they are up against a coastline or other barrier,” explained
Carrie Kappel, an NCEAS associate and one of the paper’s authors. “There
are a number of those sinks around the world where movement is blocked by a
coastline, like in the northern Adriatic Sea or the northern Gulf of Mexico,
and there’s no way out because it’s warmer everywhere behind.”
Australia offers a terrestrial example. There, species already
experiencing warmer temperatures have started to seek relief by moving to
higher elevations, or farther south. However, some species of animals and
plants cannot move large distances, and some cannot move at all.
“Species
migration can have important consequences for local biodiversity,” said
corresponding author Elvira Poloczanska, a research scientist with the Climate
Adaptation Flagship of Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Brisbane. “For
example, the dry, flat continental interior of Australia is a hot, arid region
where species already exist close to the margin of their thermal tolerances.
Some species driven south from monsoonal northern Australia in the hope of
cooler habitats may perish in one of the harshest places on Earth.”
The maps generated from the study data not only show areas where plants
and animals may struggle to find new homes in a changing climate but also
provide crucial information for targeting conservation efforts — information
that could help conservation planners think more strategically about how best
to manage biodiversity for future sustainability.
Read more at University
of California, Santa Barbara.
Fifty-year
climate trajectory models via UCSB.