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The Relative Impact of Climate Change on the Extinction Risk of Tree Species in the Montane Tropical Andes

There are widespread concerns that anthropogenic climate change will become a major cause of global biodiversity loss. However, the potential impact of climate change on the extinction risk of species remains poorly understood, particularly in comparison to other current threats. The objective of th...

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Autores principales: Tejedor Garavito, Natalia, Newton, Adrian C., Golicher, Duncan, Oldfield, Sara
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4503679/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26177097
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0131388
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author Tejedor Garavito, Natalia
Newton, Adrian C.
Golicher, Duncan
Oldfield, Sara
author_facet Tejedor Garavito, Natalia
Newton, Adrian C.
Golicher, Duncan
Oldfield, Sara
author_sort Tejedor Garavito, Natalia
collection PubMed
description There are widespread concerns that anthropogenic climate change will become a major cause of global biodiversity loss. However, the potential impact of climate change on the extinction risk of species remains poorly understood, particularly in comparison to other current threats. The objective of this research was to examine the relative impact of climate change on extinction risk of upper montane tree species in the tropical Andes, an area of high biodiversity value that is particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts. The extinction risk of 129 tree species endemic to the region was evaluated according to the IUCN Red List criteria, both with and without the potential impacts of climate change. Evaluations were supported by development of species distribution models, using three methods (generalized additive models, recursive partitioning, and support vector machines), all of which produced similarly high AUC values when averaged across all species evaluated (0.82, 0.86, and 0.88, respectively). Inclusion of climate change increased the risk of extinction of 18–20% of the tree species evaluated, depending on the climate scenario. The relative impact of climate change was further illustrated by calculating the Red List Index, an indicator that shows changes in the overall extinction risk of sets of species over time. A 15% decline in the Red List Index was obtained when climate change was included in this evaluation. While these results suggest that climate change represents a significant threat to tree species in the tropical Andes, they contradict previous suggestions that climate change will become the most important cause of biodiversity loss in coming decades. Conservation strategies should therefore focus on addressing the multiple threatening processes currently affecting biodiversity, rather than focusing primarily on potential climate change impacts.
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spelling pubmed-45036792015-07-17 The Relative Impact of Climate Change on the Extinction Risk of Tree Species in the Montane Tropical Andes Tejedor Garavito, Natalia Newton, Adrian C. Golicher, Duncan Oldfield, Sara PLoS One Research Article There are widespread concerns that anthropogenic climate change will become a major cause of global biodiversity loss. However, the potential impact of climate change on the extinction risk of species remains poorly understood, particularly in comparison to other current threats. The objective of this research was to examine the relative impact of climate change on extinction risk of upper montane tree species in the tropical Andes, an area of high biodiversity value that is particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts. The extinction risk of 129 tree species endemic to the region was evaluated according to the IUCN Red List criteria, both with and without the potential impacts of climate change. Evaluations were supported by development of species distribution models, using three methods (generalized additive models, recursive partitioning, and support vector machines), all of which produced similarly high AUC values when averaged across all species evaluated (0.82, 0.86, and 0.88, respectively). Inclusion of climate change increased the risk of extinction of 18–20% of the tree species evaluated, depending on the climate scenario. The relative impact of climate change was further illustrated by calculating the Red List Index, an indicator that shows changes in the overall extinction risk of sets of species over time. A 15% decline in the Red List Index was obtained when climate change was included in this evaluation. While these results suggest that climate change represents a significant threat to tree species in the tropical Andes, they contradict previous suggestions that climate change will become the most important cause of biodiversity loss in coming decades. Conservation strategies should therefore focus on addressing the multiple threatening processes currently affecting biodiversity, rather than focusing primarily on potential climate change impacts. Public Library of Science 2015-07-15 /pmc/articles/PMC4503679/ /pubmed/26177097 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0131388 Text en © 2015 Tejedor Garavito et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Tejedor Garavito, Natalia
Newton, Adrian C.
Golicher, Duncan
Oldfield, Sara
The Relative Impact of Climate Change on the Extinction Risk of Tree Species in the Montane Tropical Andes
title The Relative Impact of Climate Change on the Extinction Risk of Tree Species in the Montane Tropical Andes
title_full The Relative Impact of Climate Change on the Extinction Risk of Tree Species in the Montane Tropical Andes
title_fullStr The Relative Impact of Climate Change on the Extinction Risk of Tree Species in the Montane Tropical Andes
title_full_unstemmed The Relative Impact of Climate Change on the Extinction Risk of Tree Species in the Montane Tropical Andes
title_short The Relative Impact of Climate Change on the Extinction Risk of Tree Species in the Montane Tropical Andes
title_sort relative impact of climate change on the extinction risk of tree species in the montane tropical andes
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4503679/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26177097
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0131388
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