Plant extinction risk under climate change: Are forecast range shifts alone a good indicator of species vulnerability to global warming?

DA Fordham; H Resit Akçakaya; MB Araújo; J Elith; DA Keith; R Pearson; TD Auld; C Mellin; JW Morgan; TJ Regan; M Tozer; MJ Watts; M White; BA Wintle; C Yates; BW Brook

Journal article

Plant extinction risk under climate change: Are forecast range shifts alone a good indicator of species vulnerability to global warming?

DA Fordham, H Resit Akçakaya, MB Araújo, J Elith, DA Keith, R Pearson, TD Auld, C Mellin, JW Morgan, TJ Regan, M Tozer, MJ Watts, M White, BA Wintle, C Yates, BW Brook

Global Change Biology | Published : 2012

DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02614.x

Abstract

Models that couple habitat suitability with demographic processes offer a potentially improved approach for estimating spatial distributional shifts and extinction risk under climate change. Applying such an approach to five species of Australian plants with contrasting demographic traits, we show that: (i) predicted climate-driven changes in range area are sensitive to the underlying habitat model, regardless of whether demographic traits and their interaction with habitat patch configuration are modeled explicitly; and (ii) caution should be exercised when using predicted changes in total habitat suitability or geographic extent to infer extinction risk, because the relationship between th..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Jane Elith Author

Tracey Regan Author

Brendan Wintle Author

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Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council (ARC)

Awarded by National Aeronautics and Space Administration through the NASA

Awarded by Portuguese FCT

Awarded by Australian Research Council

Funding Acknowledgements

The ARC-NZ Research Network for Vegetation Function (http://www.vegfunction.net/index.html) funded two workshops, bringing together experts in the fields of plant ecology, quantitative ecology population viability analysis and species distribution modeling. Graeme Hastwell and Lee Heard helped collate species data sets. Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage grants were used to support the contributions of DAF, BWB and MJW (LP0989420); and DAK, BAW, TJR and JE (LP0989537). JE and BAW were also supported by ARC grants FT0991640 and FT100100819 respectively. Contributions of HRA and RGP were supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant No. NNX09AK19G awarded through the NASA Biodiversity Program, MBA was supported by the Portuguese FCT grant PTDC/AAC-AMB/98163/2008.