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Marine fishes experiencing high-velocity range shifts may not be climate change winners

Nature Ecology & Evolution (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Climate change is driving the global redistribution of species. A common assumption is that rapid range shifts occur in tandem with overall stable or positive abundance trends throughout the range and thus these species may be considered as climate change ‘winners’. However, although establishing the link between range shift velocities and population trends is crucial for predicting climate change impacts it has not been empirically tested. Using 2,572 estimates of changes in marine fish abundance spread across the world’s oceans, we show that poleward range shifts are not necessarily associated with positive population trends. Species experiencing high-velocity range shifts seem to experience local population declines irrespective of the position throughout the species range. High range shift velocities of 17 km yr−1 are associated with a 50% decrease in population sizes over a period of 10 yr, which is dramatic compared to the overall stable population trends in non-shifting species. This pattern, however, mostly occurs in populations located in the poleward, colder, portion of the species range. The lack of a positive association between poleward range shift velocities and population trends at the coldest portion of the range contrasts with the view that rapid range shifts safeguard against local population declines. Instead, our work suggests that marine fishes experiencing rapid range shifts could be more vulnerable to climatic change and therefore should be carefully assessed for conservation status.

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Fig. 1: The relationship between population abundance trends and range shift velocities for populations at different spatial positions under the ‘march’ scenario.
Fig. 2: The effect of range shift velocities on population trends.
Fig. 3: Accounting for the spatial and thermal positions of populations.
Fig. 4: Suggested poleward-skewed abundance distributions consistent with our empirical findings.

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Data availability

Data are freely available from the BioTIME22 and BioShifts17 databases.

Code availability

The code used in this work is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25006787.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by funding from the Quebec Center for Biodiversity Science (QCBS) awarded to J.P.L. and K.E.M. We thank members of the QCBS working group on range edge dynamics and expansion for insightful discussions and in particular, B. Leung for advising on statistical analyses at the early stages of the project. The research has been carried out under the ACTNOW research project (European Commission grant agreement no. 101060072). We are grateful to the BioTIME and BioShifts data curators and their teams for compiling and extracting extensive datasets and enabling the investigation of global biodiversity patterns.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Shahar Chaikin & Jonathan Belmaker

  2. Department of Environmental Geography, Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

    Federico Riva

  3. Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Katie E. Marshall

  4. Department of Biology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Jean-Philippe Lessard

  5. The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Tel Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Jonathan Belmaker

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Contributions

S.C., J.B., J.P.L. and F.R. conceived and planned the study. S.C., J.P.L. and J.B. led the writing. S.C., F.R. and J.B. designed the analyses. F.R. and S.C. prepared the data. S.C. performed all analyses and made the figures. J.B. supervised this study. J.P.L., K.E.M. and J.B. contributed financially. All authors commented on and edited the manuscript drafts and contributed importantly to the development of this study. All authors contributed to revisions and consented to the manuscript being submitted in its final form.

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Correspondence to Shahar Chaikin.

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Chaikin, S., Riva, F., Marshall, K.E. et al. Marine fishes experiencing high-velocity range shifts may not be climate change winners. Nat Ecol Evol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02350-7

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