Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Focus on poleward shifts in species' distribution underestimates the fingerprint of climate change

Abstract

Species are largely predicted to shift poleward as global temperatures increase, with this fingerprint of climate change being already observed across a range of taxonomic groups and, mostly temperate, geographic locations1,2,3,4,5. However, the assumption of uni-directional distribution shifts does not account for complex interactions among temperature, precipitation and species-specific tolerances6, all of which shape the direction and magnitude of changes in a species’ climatic niche. We analysed 60 years of past climate change on the Australian continent, assessing the velocity of changes in temperature and precipitation, as well as changes in climatic niche space for 464 Australian birds. We show large magnitude and rapid rates of change in Australian climate over the past 60 years resulting in high-velocity and multi-directional, including equatorial, shifts in suitable climatic space for birds (ranging from 0.1 to 7.6 km yr−1, mean 1.27 km yr−1). Overall, if measured only in terms of poleward distribution shifts, the fingerprint of climate change is underestimated by an average of 26% in temperate regions of the continent and by an average of 95% in tropical regions. We suggest that the velocity of movement required by Australian species to track their climatic niche may be much faster than previously thought and that the interaction between temperature and precipitation changes will result in multi-directional distribution shifts globally.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Velocity of change in temperature and precipitation from 1950 to 2010.
Figure 2: Change in the distribution of the climatic niche of 464 Australian bird species from 1950 to 2010.
Figure 3: Distribution of species with expanding, shifting and contracting climatic niche geographic space.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Walther, G-R. et al. Ecological responses to recent climate change. Nature 416, 389–395 (2002).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Parmesan, C. & Yohe, G. A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems. Nature 421, 37–42 (2003).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Root, T. L. et al. Fingerprints of global warming on wild animals and plants. Nature 421, 57–60 (2003).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Chen, I-C., Hill, J. K., Ohlemüller, R., Roy, D. B. & Thomas, C. D. Rapid range shifts of species associated with high levels of climate warming. Science 333, 1024–1026 (2011).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Hickling, R., Roy, D. B., Hill, J. K., Fox, R. & Thomas, C. D. The distributions of a wide range of taxonomic groups are expanding polewards. Glob. Change Biol. 12, 450–455 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Parmesan, C. Ecological and evolutionary responses to recent climate change. Ann. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Sys. 37, 637–669 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Loarie, S. R. et al. The velocity of climate change. Nature 462, 1052–1055 (2009).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  8. Jump, A. S. & Peñuelas, J. Running to stand still: Adaptation and the response of plants to rapid climate change. Ecol. Lett. 8, 1010–1020 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Bradshaw, W. E. & Holzapfel, C. M. Evolutionary response to rapid climate change. Science 312, 1477–1478 (2006).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Murphy, H. T., VanDerWal, J. & Lovett-Doust, J. Signatures of range expansion and erosion in eastern North American trees. Ecol. Lett. 13, 1233–1244 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Hughes, L. Climate change and Australia: Trends, projections and impacts. Austral Ecol. 28, 423–443 (2003).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. IPCC Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report (eds Core Writing Team, Pachauri, R.K. & Reisinger, A.) (IPCC, 2007).

  13. Reside, A. E., Vanderwal, J. J., Kutt, A. S. & Perkins, G. C. Weather not climate, defines distributions of vagile bird species. PLoS One 5, e13569 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Thomas, C. D. Climate, climate change and range boundaries. Divers. Distrib. 16, 488–495 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Williams, S. E., Bolitho, E. E. & Fox, S. Climate change in Australian tropical rainforests: an impending environmental catastrophe. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. Ser. B 270, 1887–1892 (2003).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Tingley, M. W., Monahan, W. B., Beissinger, S. R. & Moritz, C. Birds track their Grinnellian niche through a century of climate change. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 19637–19643 (2009).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  17. Gregory, R. D. et al. An indicator of the impact of climatic change on European bird populations. PLoS ONE 4, e4678 (2009).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Devictor, V. et al. Differences in the climatic debts of birds and butterflies at a continental scale. Nature Clim. Change 2, 121–124 (2012).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Chambers, L. E., Hughes, L. & Weston, M. A. Climate change and its impact on Australia’s avifauna. Emu 105, 1–20 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Olsen, P. Wingspan Vol. 14 (suppl.) (2007).

  21. Dawson, T. P., Jackson, S. T., House, J. I., Prentice, I. C. & Mace, G. M. Beyond predictions: Biodiversity conservation in a changing climate. Science 332, 53–58 (2011).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  22. Tewksbury, J. J., Huey, R. B. & Deutsch, C. A. Ecology—putting the heat on tropical animals. Science 320, 1296–1297 (2008).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  23. Jones, D. A., Wang, W. & Fawcett, R. High-quality spatial climate datasets for Australia. Aust. Met. Ocean. J. 58, 233–248 (2009).

    Google Scholar 

  24. Vincenty, T. Direct and inverse solutions of geodesics on the ellipsoid with application of nested equations. Surv. Rev. 23, 88–93 (1975).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. VanDerWal, J., Falconi, L., Januchowski, S., Shoo, L. P. & Storlie, C. SDMTools: Species distribution modelling tools: Tools for processing data associated with species distribution modelling exercises. R package version 1.1-6 (2011).

  26. Blakers, M., Davies, S. & Reilly, P. The Atlas of Australian Birds (Royal Australian Ornithologists Union, 1984).

    Google Scholar 

  27. Barrett, G., Silcocks, A., Simon, B., Cunningham, R. & Poulter, R. The New Atlas of Australian Birds (Royal Australian Ornithologists Union, 2003).

    Google Scholar 

  28. Williams, S. E. et al. Distributions, life-history specialization, and phylogeny of the rain forest vertebrates in the Australian Wet Tropics. Ecology 91, 2493 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Reside, A. E., Watson, I., VanDerWal, J. & Kutt, A. S. Incorporating low-resolution historic species location data decreases performance of distribution models. Ecol. Model. 222, 3444–3448 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Phillips, S. J., Anderson, R. P. & Schapire, R. E. Maximum entropy modeling of species geographic distributions. Ecol. Model. 190, 231–259 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Phillips, S. J. & Dudik, M. Modeling of species distributions with Maxent: New extensions and a comprehensive evaluation. Ecography 31, 161–175 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank our colleagues B. Laurance, E. Vanderduys and B. Phillips for their comments on the paper. This work was financially supported by James Cook University, the Centre for Tropical Biodiversity & Climate Change and the CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

J.V., A.S.K. and A.E.R. conceived the study. J.V., A.S.K., B.L.B. and A.E.R. designed the study. G.C.P. and J.J.P. collated and vetted data. J.V., H.T.M., G.C.P., B.L.B. and J.J.P. performed the analysis. H.T.M. and J.V. wrote the paper. All authors discussed and commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jeremy VanDerWal or Brooke L. Bateman.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Information (PDF 674 kb)

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Movie 1 (MOV 1575 kb)

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Movie 2 (MOV 1474 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

VanDerWal, J., Murphy, H., Kutt, A. et al. Focus on poleward shifts in species' distribution underestimates the fingerprint of climate change. Nature Clim Change 3, 239–243 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1688

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1688

This article is cited by

Search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing