Biodiversity change under climate change

An article in the latest Science reviewed the recent progress and highlighted the uncertainty in existing prediction models (details).

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Predicting the fate of biodiversity in response to climate change combined with habitat fragmentation is a serious undertaking fraught with caveats and complexities. The recent studies discussed here attempt to quantify some of the uncertainty in these predictions. They use larger, more detailed data sets and more-refined models than previously available, thus avoiding the problems often encountered in trying to scale up results from small local-scale studies.

The results also highlight a serious issue for future conservationists: the urgent need to develop a research agenda for regions outside of protected reserves in human-modified landscapes (see the figure) (13). Although every measure should be put in place to reduce further fragmentation of reserves, we must determine what represents a "good" intervening matrix in these human-modified landscapes (11–14). Furthermore, with the combination of climate change and habitat destruction, novel ecosystems are going to become increasingly common. Their conservation will require a whole new definition of what is "natural" (15)."