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Biodiversity

Interacting global change drivers

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 913–914 (2015)Cite this article

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Climate change impacts on species do not occur in isolation. Now research on drought-sensitive British butterflies uses citizen science to attribute the drivers of population changes and shows landscape management to be a key part of the solution.

Biodiversity is affected by a plethora of global change factors, which makes attributing observed changes to particular drivers and pressures, and accounting for their interactions, a challenging task1. Unfortunately “tools to understand and manage these interactions remain limited”2. In this issue of Nature Climate Change, Oliver et al.3 present one way to disentangle interacting environmental effects — in this case, climate change and habitat fragmentation — on drought-sensitive butterfly populations. They analyse the responses of 28 butterfly species to an extreme drought event in 1995 using long-term monitoring data from the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme. This data was linked with satellite-derived land-cover maps to characterize how the area and configuration of surrounding semi-natural habitats (SNH) modifies species responses to drought. They selected six species that exhibit reduced growth rates during times of aridity. All six exhibited major population collapses after the 1995 drought. The authors used the return time of aridity events as a way to communicate the core results — for example, an aridity return time of effectively one year under the RCP8.5 scenario in 2100.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Community Ecology, Josef Settele and Martin Wiemers are at the UFZ - Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Theodor-Lieser-Strasse 4, 06120 Halle, Germany,

    Josef Settele & Martin Wiemers

  2. J.S. is also at iDiv, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Deutscher Platz 5e, 04103 Leipzig, Germany,

    Josef Settele

Authors
  1. Josef Settele
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  2. Martin Wiemers
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Correspondence to Josef Settele.

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Settele, J., Wiemers, M. Interacting global change drivers. Nature Clim Change 5, 913–914 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2815

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2815

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