Abstract

Protecting biodiversity against the impacts of climate change requires effective conservation strategies that safeguard species at risk of extinction(1). Microrefugia allowed populations to survive adverse climatic conditions in the past(2,3), but their potential to reduce extinction risk from anthropogenic warming is poorly understood(3-5), hindering our capacity to develop robust in situ measures to adapt conservation to climate change(6). Here, we show that microclimatic heterogeneity has strongly buffered species against regional extirpations linked to recent climate change. Using more than five million distribution records for 430 climate-threatened and range-declining species, population losses across England are found to be reduced in areas where topography generated greater variation in the microclimate. The buffering effect of topographic microclimates was strongest for those species adversely affected by warming and in areas that experienced the highest levels of warming: in such conditions, extirpation risk was reduced by 22% for plants and by 9% for insects. Our results indicate the critical role of topographic variation in creating microrefugia, and provide empirical evidence that microclimatic heterogeneity can substantially reduce extinction risk from climate change.

Published in

Nature Climate Change
2018, Volume: 8, number: 8, pages: 713-717
Publisher: NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP

SLU Authors

• Auffret, Alistair

  • Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Sustainable Development Goals

Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts


UKÄ Subject classification

Climate Research
Ecology


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0231-9

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/96462