The Earth is warming. The plants and animals that populate its
surface struggle to cope and must shift their distributions to areas of
newly suitable climate to survive, resulting in major redistributions of
ecosystems. This might sound like a description of today, but it’s
actually what the Earth was like ~17,000 years ago, after the Last
Glacial Maximum (LGM). Over a period of roughly 9,000 years, the climate
warmed drastically, ecosystems were lost and present-day species
assemblages emerged. This time period is the perfect natural experiment
for understanding how climate change will affect biodiversity today and
in the future.
As the climate begins to warm again, scientists are struggling to
make large-scale predictions about how species will respond. We can
estimate how the climate will change and predict where suitable habitat
for species will occur through time (the ‘climate-path’), but we do not
have a good understanding of how well species will be able to follow
their climate-paths. Without this, we cannot make predictions about how
species distributions will change. By studying the effects of warming
since the LGM, we can learn which traits enable species to shift, or not
shift, with climatic change, helping us to draw generalisations about
how other species will move in the future.
I will use recently-released high-resolution datasets that provide
detailed information on palaeo-ecological climate and land use, and
concomitant data of hundreds of plant and animal species occurrences
across the globe to observe how well species tracked their climate-paths
after the LGM. I will identify which traits determine how successful
species were in shifting and use this information to predict where
hundreds of other species will occur in the future. Not only will this
provide fascinating insight into the processes governing the movement of
species around the world, but it will also provide crucial information
for making effective conservation decisions. As the Earth’s Climate
Emergency worsens, this project will allow protected area planning to
incorporate future species distributions and identify the winners and
losers of climate change, ensuring we are able to protect the
biodiversity of tomorrow.
