Trait-mediated shifts and climate velocity decouple an endothermic marine predator and its ectothermic prey

Climate change is redistributing biodiversity globally and distributional shifts have been found to follow local climate velocities. It is largely assumed that marine endotherms such as cetaceans might shift more slowly than ectotherms in response to warming and would primarily follow changes in prey, but distributional shifts in cetaceans are difficult to quantify. Here we use data from fisheries bycatch and strandings to examine changes in the distribution of long-finned pilot whales (Globicephala melas), and assess shifts in pilot whales and their prey relative to climate velocity in a rapidly warming region of the Northwest Atlantic. We found a poleward shift in pilot whale distribution that exceeded climate velocity and occurred at more than three times the rate of fish and invertebrate prey species. Fish and invertebrates shifted at rates equal to or slower than expected based on climate velocity, with more slowly shifting species moving to deeper waters. We suggest that traits such as mobility, diet specialization, and thermoregulatory strategy are central to understanding and anticipating range shifts. Our findings highlight the potential for trait-mediated climate shifts to decouple relationships between endothermic cetaceans and their ectothermic prey, which has important implications for marine food web dynamics and ecosystem stability.

Future climate and land use instability can negate the benefits of protected areas

Expanding protected area networks and enhancing their capacities is currently one avenue at the forefront of efforts to conserve and restore global biodiversity. Climate and habitat loss resulting from land use interact synergistically to undermine the potential benefits of protected areas (PAs). Targeting conservation, adaptation and mitigation efforts requires an understanding of patterns of climate and land-use change within the current arrangement of PAs, and how these might change in the future. In this paper, we provide this understanding using predicted rates of temporal and spatial displacement of future climate and land use globally and within PAs. We show that ~ 47% of the world’s PAs—10.6% of which are under restrictive management—are located in regions that will likely experience both climate stress and land-use instability by 2050. The vast majority of these PAs are also distributed across moist biomes and in high conservation value regions, and fall into less-restrictive management categories. The differential impacts of combined land use and climate velocity across protected biomes indicate that climate and land-use change may have fundamentally different ecological and management consequences at multiple scales. Taken together, our findings can inform spatially adaptive natural resource management and actions to achieve sustainable development and biodiversity goals.

Climate velocities and lagged species elevational shifts in mountain ranges

Mountain ranges support concentrations of climate-endangered endemic species, and are potential refugia for species retreating from the lowlands under anthropogenic climate change. Predicting the outcome for biodiversity requires knowledge of whether species are shifting uphill at the same rate as temperature isotherms (i.e. whether they are successfully tracking the velocity of climatic changes)1. Here, we provide a global assessment of the velocity of climate change in mountain ranges: applying thermal dynamic theory, deriving moist adiabatic lapse rates (MALR) using local surface temperature and water vapor. MALR varied substantially around the world, from 3 to 9°C cooling per km elevation increase. Consider the rate of terrestrial surface warming from 1971 to 2015, 24 regions can be identified as exhibiting high velocities where the isotherms have shifted more than one standard deviation of the global mean value (> 8.45 m yr-1). High velocities are typically found in relatively dry parts of the world, but also occur in wet regions with low lapse rates, such as in Northern Sumatra, Western Guiana Shield, Northern Andes, Costa Rica, Nepal, and Madagascar. Analysis of biodiversity data in relation to mountain-specific velocities revealed more cases of tracking between species and isotherms than previously suggested2 and more likely occurred at lower climate velocity. Nevertheless, upslope migrations of montane species have generally been lagging behind climate velocity. Such lags could continue to effect change even if the climate were to stabilize immediately. Reducing emissions would be expected to minimize lags, as well as slow the velocities of warming and required responses everywhere.

Incorporating climate velocity into the design of climate-smart networks of protected areas

Climate change is redistributing terrestrial and marine biodiversity and altering fundamental ecological interactions. To adequately conserve biodiversity and promote its long-term persistence, protected areas should account for the ecological implications of species redistribution. Data paucity across many systems means that achieving this goal requires generic metrics that represent likely responses of multiple taxa to climate change. Climate velocity is one such metric, reflecting potential species range shifts at a generic level. Here, we explore four approaches to incorporating climate velocity metrics into the design of protected areas using the Mediterranean Sea as an illustrative example. Our methods are designed to meet two climate-smart planning objectives: 1) protect climate refugia by selecting slow-moving climate velocity areas, and 2) maintain the capacity of ecological systems to adapt by representing a suite of climate-velocity trajectory classes. We found that incorporating climate velocity as a cost measure in Marxan is the best approach for selecting slower-moving areas, which are good indicators of climate refugia. However, this approach fails to accommodate socio-economic cost data, and is probably impractical. Incorporating climate velocity as a boundary or as a feature provides both selection of slower-moving areas and solutions with lower socio-economic cost. Finally, we were able to design cost-effective networks of protected areas representing a suite of climate-velocity trajectories classes, which have the potential to help species adapt to a changing climate. This work presents simple and practical ways of including climate velocity in conservation plans on land and in the ocean to achieve the key climate-smart objectives of protecting climate refugia and enhancing ecological resilience.

The realised velocity of climate change reveals remarkable idiosyncrasy of species’ distributional shifts

To date, our understanding of how species have shifted in response to recent climate warming has been based on a few studies with a limited number of species. Here we present a comprehensive, global overview of species’ distributional responses to changing climate across a broad variety of taxa (animals, plants, and fungi). We characterise species’ responses using a metric that describes the realised velocity of climate change: how closely species’ responses have tracked changing climate through time. In contrast to existing ‘climate velocity’ metrics that have focused on space, we focus on species and index their responses to a null expectation of change in order to examine drivers of inter-specific variation. Here we show that species are tracking climate on average, but not sufficiently to keep up with the pace of climate change. Further, species responses are highly idiosyncratic, and thus highlight that projections assuming uniform responses may be misleading. This is in stark contrast to species’ present-day and historical climate niches, which show strong evidence of the imprint of evolutionary history and functional traits. Our analyses are a first step in exploring the vast wealth of empirical data on species’ historic responses to recent climate change.