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Climate-tracking species are not invasive

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 382–384 (2020)Cite this article

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Applying an invasive framework to native species that are shifting their ranges in response to climate change adopts an adversarial, local and static paradigm that is often at odds with protecting global biodiversity.

Climate change is already altering local species abundances, affecting ecosystems, inducing extinctions and shifting species ranges along elevational and latitudinal gradients1,2. Biologists and managers increasingly must decide how to protect biodiversity and ecosystems from climate change, including when and how to preserve local populations and what to do about new species arriving via climate-induced range shifts3,4. One approach (for example, see ref. 5) is to adopt insights developed for invasive species and apply them to species shifting their distributions in response to changing climates (hereafter referred to as ‘climate-tracking species’). Although it is tempting to draw comparisons between climate-tracking and invasive species, here I will discuss the flaws in this analogy and how its application may even threaten efforts to conserve global biodiversity.

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Fig. 1: Invasive and climate-tracking species differ in geographic origins, which influences their expected effect on new ecosystems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Mark C. Urban

  2. Center of Biological Risk, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Mark C. Urban

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  1. Mark C. Urban
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Correspondence to Mark C. Urban.

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Urban, M.C. Climate-tracking species are not invasive. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 382–384 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0770-8

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