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Anthropogenic range contractions bias species climate change forecasts

Nature Climate Change volume 8, pages 252–256 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Forecasts of species range shifts under climate change most often rely on ecological niche models, in which characterizations of climate suitability are highly contingent on the species range data used. If ranges are far from equilibrium under current environmental conditions, for instance owing to local extinctions in otherwise suitable areas, modelled environmental suitability can be truncated, leading to biased estimates of the effects of climate change. Here we examine the impact of such biases on estimated risks from climate change by comparing models of the distribution of North American mammals based on current ranges with ranges accounting for historical information on species ranges. We find that estimated future diversity, almost everywhere, except in coastal Alaska, is drastically underestimated unless the full historical distribution of the species is included in the models. Consequently forecasts of climate change impacts on biodiversity for many clades are unlikely to be reliable without acknowledging anthropogenic influences on contemporary ranges.

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Fig. 1: Improvement of fossil prediction for climatic hind-casting when incorporating historical records.
Fig. 2: Effect of the incorporation of historical records for predicted future diversity.

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Acknowledgements

S.F. was supported by the Danish Natural Science Research Council #4090-00227 and vetenskabsrådet (The Swedish research council) #2017-03862. M.B.A. acknowledges support from AAG-MAA/3764/2014 and the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) for his work and support from the Danish Natural Science Research Council to the Centre for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate (CMEC). We thank C. Bacon for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden

    Søren Faurby

  2. Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre, Göteborg, Sweden

    Søren Faurby

  3. Department of Biogeography and Global Change, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, CSIC, Madrid, Spain

    Søren Faurby & Miguel B. Araújo

  4. InBio/Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos (CIBIO), Universidade de Évora, Évora, Portugal

    Miguel B. Araújo

  5. Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Miguel B. Araújo

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  1. Søren Faurby
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S.F. and M.B.A. designed research; S.F. performed research; S.F. analysed data; S.F. and M.B.A. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Søren Faurby.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figures 1–7 and Supplementary Tables 1–5

Supplementary Data 1

The file lists all records from GBIF which we did not include and all records where our taxonomical assignment was different to the original taxonomy from GBIF

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Faurby, S., Araújo, M.B. Anthropogenic range contractions bias species climate change forecasts. Nature Clim Change 8, 252–256 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0089-x

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