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Robert K. Colwell


Museum Curator Adjoint in Entomology


robertkcolwell [at] gmail.com


Museum of Natural History


University of Colorado


Boulder, CO 80309, USA




robertkcolwell [at] gmail.com


Museum of Natural History


University of Colorado


Boulder, CO 80309, USA



Assessing the threat to montane biodiversity from discordant shifts in temperature and precipitation in a changing climate.


Journal article


C. McCain, R. K. Colwell
Ecology letters, 2011

Semantic Scholar DOI PubMed
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Cite

APA
McCain, C., & Colwell, R. K. (2011). Assessing the threat to montane biodiversity from discordant shifts in temperature and precipitation in a changing climate. Ecology Letters.

Chicago/Turabian
McCain, C., and R. K. Colwell. “Assessing the Threat to Montane Biodiversity from Discordant Shifts in Temperature and Precipitation in a Changing Climate.” Ecology letters (2011).

MLA
McCain, C., and R. K. Colwell. “Assessing the Threat to Montane Biodiversity from Discordant Shifts in Temperature and Precipitation in a Changing Climate.” Ecology Letters, 2011.


Abstract

Mountains are centres of global biodiversity, endemism and threatened species. Elevational gradients present opportunities for species currently living near their upper thermal limits to track cooler temperatures upslope in warming climates, but only if changes in precipitation are sufficiently in step with temperature. We model local population extirpation risk for a range of temperature and precipitation scenarios over the next 100 years for 16 848 vertebrate species populations distributed along 156 elevational gradients. Average population extirpation risks due to warming alone were < 5%, but increased 10-fold, on average, when changes in precipitation were also considered. Under the driest scenarios (minimum predicted precipitation), local extirpation risks increased sharply (50-60%) and were especially worrisome for hydrophilic amphibians and montane Latin America (c. 80%). Realistic assessment of risks urgently requires improved monitoring of precipitation, better regional precipitation models and more research on the effects of changes in precipitation on montane distributions.


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