Aim
Many conservation efforts now focus on mitigating biodiversity loss due to climate change. While a focus on impacts from mean, long‐term changes in climate is warranted, the vast majority of conservation plans largely ignore another key factor of climate change—changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather and climate events. A typology of the full range and severity of ecological responses to extreme events would help underpin tracking of their impacts.
Location
Global.
Methods
Here, we review 519 observational studies of ecological responses to extreme events between 1941 and 2015. We include responses from amphibians, birds, fish, invertebrates, mammals, plants and reptiles to cyclones, drought, flood, cold waves and heat waves.
Results
Negative ecological responses were the most commonly reported, accounting for 57% of all documented responses. There were over 100 cases of a >25% population decline and 31 cases of local extirpation. Sixty per cent of the studies in our review observed ecological responses for more than 1 year, and of the studies that monitored species or ecosystem recovery following exposure to an extreme event, 38% showed species or ecosystems did not recover to pre‐disturbance levels.
Main conclusions
Extreme weather and climate events have profound implications for species and ecosystem management. We discuss current conceptual challenges associated with incorporating extreme events into conservation planning efforts, which include how to quantify species sensitivity and adaptive capacity to extreme events, how to account for interactions between extreme events and other stressors, and how to maximize adaptive capacity to more frequent and intense extreme events.
Over the past twelve years the number of papers that explore the impacts of climate change on biodiversity in the conservation literature has grown on average by 20% annually. By categorising these papers on their primary research questions, we show that the vast majority of these articles (88.6%) focus only on those impacts that arise directly as a result of climate change, ignoring the potentially significant indirect threats that arise from human adaptation responses. This pattern has remained fairly consistent throughout the review period (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012), with a trend towards more articles considering both direct and indirect impacts towards the end of the period. We also find a bias in the time-frames considered by published articles that project future impacts of climate change on biodiversity, with more than three-quarters (77.9%) of papers only considering impacts after 2031, and almost half (49.1%) only considering impacts after 2051. This focus on long-term, direct impacts creates a mismatch, not only with the life-cycles of species and timescales of many ecological processes, but also with most management and policy timelines and the short-term nature of human decision making processes. The focus on studying the long-term, direct impacts of climate change on biodiversity is likely a function of the lack of availability of climate projections on shorter temporal scales; a perception that short-term impacts will be minor; and, insufficient integration with the social and political sciences. While the direct impact of changes in mean climatic conditions will significantly change the biosphere by the end of the century, near term changes in seasonality and extreme events coupled with human adaptation responses are likely to have substantial impacts much sooner, threatening the survival of species and ecosystems. It is therefore essential that we balance our research efforts to facilitate a better understanding of these more imminent threats.
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