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.

Eco-evolutionary responses of biodiversity to climate change

Nature Climate Change volume 2, pages 747–751 (2012)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Climate change is predicted to alter global species diversity1, the distribution of human pathogens2 and ecosystem services3. Forecasting these changes and designing adequate management of future ecosystem services will require predictive models encompassing the most fundamental biotic responses. However, most present models omit important processes such as evolution and competition4,5. Here we develop a spatially explicit eco-evolutionary model of multi-species responses to climate change. We demonstrate that both dispersal and evolution differentially mediate extinction risks and biodiversity alterations through time and across climate gradients. Together, high genetic variance and low dispersal best minimized extinction risks. Surprisingly, high dispersal did not reduce extinctions, because the shifting ranges of some species hastened the decline of others. Evolutionary responses dominated during the later stages of climatic changes and in hot regions. No extinctions occurred without competition, which highlights the importance of including species interactions in global biodiversity models. Most notably, climate change created extinction and evolutionary debts, with changes in species richness and traits occurring long after climate stabilization. Therefore, even if we halt anthropogenic climate change today, transient eco-evolutionary dynamics would ensure centuries of additional alterations in global biodiversity.

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

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Get just this article for as long as you need it

$39.95

Learn more

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

Figure 1: Relative contribution of evolutionary and ecological processes to change in the mean community trait (guide, lower left panel) over time (y axis, ranging from 0 to 500 generations) and space (x axis) in communities with competition.
Figure 2: Species (indicated by different coloured lines) abundances and traits over space (x axis for each panel) for different values of D (rows) and V (columns) before and after climate change has taken place in communities with competition.
Figure 3: Time development of the change in species richness during climate change (rate of change in temperature shown as grey shading rate is zero after time=300 indicated by the dashed vertical line, see also figure guide of Fig. 1, panel for climate change) for the hump-shaped environmental cline.

References

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

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Gregory, P. J, Johnson, S. N, Newton, A. C. & Ingram, J. S. I Integrating pests and pathogens into the climate change/food security debate. J. Exp. Bot. 60, 2827–2009 (2009).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Millenium Ecosystem Assessment: Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Synthesis (Island Press, 2005).

  4. Thomas, C. D. et al. Extinction risk from climate change. Nature 427, 145–148 (2004).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Urban, M. C., De Meester, L., Vellend, M., Stoks, R. & Vanoverbeke, J. A crucial step toward realism: Responses to climate change from an evolving metacommunity perspective. Evol. Appl. 5, 154–167 (2012).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Tylianakis, J. M., Didham, R. K., Bascompte, J. & Wardle, D. A. Global change and species interactions in terrestrial ecosystems. Ecol. Lett. 11, 1351–1363 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Franks, S. J., Sim, S. & Weis, A. E. Rapid evolution of flowering time by an annual plant in response to a climate fluctuation. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 104, 1278–1282 (2007).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  8. Balanya, J., Oller, J. M., Huey, R. B., Gilchrist, G. W. & Serra, L. Global genetic change tracks global climate warming in Drosophila subobscura. Science 313, 1773–1775 (2006).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. Skelly, D. K. et al. Evolutionary responses to climate change. Conserv. Biol. 21, 1353–1355 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Brooker, R. W. et al. Modelling species’ range shifts in a changing climate: The impacts of biotic interactions, dispersal distance and the rate of climate change. J. Theoret. Biol. 245, 59–65 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Münkemüller, T. & Bello, F. de From diversity indices to community assembly processes: A test with simulated data. Ecography 34, 1–13 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Gienapp, P., Teplitsky, C., Alho, J. S., Mills, J. A. & Merila, J. Climate change and evolution: Disentangling environmental and genetic responses. Mol. Ecol. 17, 167–178 (2008).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  13. Pelletier, F., Garant, D. & Hendry, A. P. Eco-evolutionary dynamics. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B. 364, 1483–1489 (2009).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  14. De Mazancourt, C., Johnson, E. & Barraclough, T. G. Biodiversity inhibits species’ evolutionary responses to changing environments. Ecol. Lett. 11, 380–388 (2008).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  15. Holt, R. D. Bringing the Hutchinsonian niche into the 21st century: Ecological and evolutionary perspectives. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 19659–19665 (2009).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  16. Lenormand, G. Gene flow and the limits to natural selection. Trends Ecol. Evol. 17, 183–189 (2002).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Case, T. J. & Taper, M. L. Interspecific competition, environmental gradients, gene flow, and the coevolution of species’ borders. Am. Nature 155, 583–605 (2000).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  18. Ackerly, D. D. Community assembly, niche conservatims, and adaptive evolution in changing environments. Int. J. Plant Sci. 164, S165–S184 (2003).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Leibold, M. A., Holt, R. D. & Holyoak, M. in Metacommunities: Spatial Dynamics and Ecological Communities (eds Holyoak, M., Leibold, M. A. & Holt, R.) (Univ. Chicago Press, 2005).

    Google Scholar 

  20. Collins, S. & Gardner, A. Integrating physiological, ecological and evolutionary change: A Price equation approach. Ecol. Lett. 12, 744–757 (2009).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Kubisch, A. et al. On the elasticity of range limits during periods of expansion. Ecology 91, 3094–3099 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Burton, O. J. et al. Trade-offs and the evolution of life-histories during range expansion. Ecol. Lett. 13, 1210–1220 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Mousseau, T. A. & Roff, D. A. Natural selection and the heritability of fitness components. Heredity 59, 181–197 (1987).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Hoffman, A. A. & Sgrò, C. M. Climate change and evolutionary adaptation. Nature 470, 479–485 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Chen, I. et al. Rapid range shifts of species associated with high levels of climate warming. Science 333, 1024–1026 (2011).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  26. Willis, K. J. & MacDonald, G. M. Long-term ecological records and their relevance to climate change predictions for a warmer world. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 42, 267–287 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Bell, G. & Gonzalez, A. Adaptation and evolutionary rescue in metapopulations experiencing environmental deterioration. Science 332, 1327–1330 (2011).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  28. Brockhurst, M. A. et al. Niche occupation limits adaptive radiation in experimental microcosms. PLoS ONE 2, e193 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Lau, J. A. et al. Species interactions in a changing environment: Elevated CO2 alters the ecological and potential evolutionary consequences of competition. Evol. Ecol. Res. 12, 435–455 (2010).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was conducted as part of the Evolution in Meta-Communities Working Group supported by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, a centre financially supported by the NSF (grant EF-0553768), the University of California, Santa Barbara and the State of California. Additional support was also provided for M. Urban, the NCEAS postdoctoral associate in the group. J.N. was supported by the Swedish Research Council and the Strategic Research Program EkoKlim at Stockholm University. M.C.U. was supported by NSF award DEB-1119877 and a J. F. McDonnell foundation grant. M.V. was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canada. N.L. received financial support from Université Pierre & Marie Curie and from CNRS. C.A.K. was supported by grants from the J. S. McDonnell Foundation and NSF awards DEB-0845825, OCE-0928819 and DEB-1136710. C. de Mazancourt provided insights for the partitioning of the change in mean trait. This is contribution 1700 of the Kellogg Biological Station.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems Ecology, Stockholm University, 10697 Kräftriket 9a, 11429 Stockholm, Sweden

    Jon Norberg

  2. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Kräftriket 2b, 11429 Stockholm, Sweden

    Jon Norberg

  3. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Biopharm building Room 200A, 75 N. Eagleville Rd., Unit 3043, Storrs, Connecticut 06269-3043, USA

    Mark C. Urban

  4. Département de biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec J1K 2R1, Canada

    Mark Vellend

  5. W. K. Kellogg Biological Station and Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University, Hickory Corners, Michigan 49060, USA

    Christopher A. Klausmeier

  6. Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Laboratoire Ecologie et Evolution, UMR 7625, Ecologie des populations et communautés (USC2031, INRA), Batiment A, 7eme etage, case 237, 7 quai st Bernard, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France

    Nicolas Loeuille

Authors
  1. Jon Norberg
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Mark C. Urban
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Mark Vellend
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Christopher A. Klausmeier
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Nicolas Loeuille
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

All authors conceived the problem and formulated the model. C.A.K. and J.N. coded the model. J.N. ran the simulations. All authors contributed to interpretation of results and writing the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jon Norberg.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Information 1 (PDF 1200 kb)

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Information 2 (PDF 241 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Norberg, J., Urban, M., Vellend, M. et al. Eco-evolutionary responses of biodiversity to climate change. Nature Clim Change 2, 747–751 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1588

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1588

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced 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