Predicted impact of climate change on European bats in relation to their biogeographic patterns

Abstract

There has been considerable recent interest concerning the impact of climate change on a wide range of taxa. However, little is known about how the biogeographic affinities of taxa may affect their responses to these impacts. Our main aim was to study how predicted climate change will affect the distribution of 28 European bat species grouped by their biogeographic patterns as determined by a spatial Principal Component Analysis. Using presence-only modelling techniques and climatic data (minimum temperature, average temperature, precipitation, humidity and daily temperature range) for four different climate change scenarios (IPCC scenarios ranging from the most extreme A1FI, A2, B2 to the least severe, B1), we predict the potential geographic distribution of bat species in Europe grouped according to their biogeographic patterns for the years 2020-2030, 2050-2060 and 2090-2100. Biogeographic patterns exert a great influence on a species' response to climate change. Bat species more associated with colder climates, hence northern latitudes, could be more severely affected with some extinctions predicted by the end of the century. The Mediterranean and Temperate groups seem to be more tolerant of temperature increases, however, their projections varied considerably under different climate change scenarios. Scenario A1FI was clearly the most detrimental for European bat diversity, with several extinctions and declines in occupied area predicted for several species. The B scenarios were less damaging and even predicted that some species could increase their geographical ranges. However, all models only took into account climatic envelopes whereas available habitat and species interactions will also probably play an important role in delimiting future distribution patterns. The models may therefore generate 'best case' predictions about future changes in the distribution of European bats.

Conservation Ecology of Cave Bats

“…As with other taxa, climate change is predicted to alter the distribution of bat species (Scheel et al 1996;La Val 2004;Rebelo et al 2010;Hughes et al 2012). Altered distribution patterns are also anticipated for hibernating species due to changes in energetic demands (Humphries et al 2002).…”

“…15.6). Even species capable of shifting their ranges in response to the rapid rate of current climate change may be hampered by the limited availability of suitable caves and potential time required for suitable foraging habitats to develop (Rebelo et al 2010). …”

Climate change threatens giant panda protection in the 21st century

“…This approach has shown to be one of the best performing models in predicting species distributions with presence-only data (Elith et al, 2006;Hijmans and Graham, 2006), and it has been extensively applied to project species range and vegetation shifts under climate change (Rebelo et al, 2010;Ponce-Reyes et al, 2012;Wong et al, 2013). The full extent of the study area was used to extract background (pseudo-absence) data to improve model performance (VanderWal et al, 2009).…”

Climate change‐induced decline in bamboo habitats and species diversity: implications for giant panda conservation

“…In response to criticisms to the use of the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) in the species distribution modelling (Lobo et al, 2008;Li & Guo, 2013), we assessed model performance with both average AUC and the relative importance of commission and omission. AUC provides a single measure of model performance and ranges from 0.5 (randomness) to 1 (perfect discrimination), where a score higher than 0.7 is considered a good model performance (Fielding & Bell, 1997;Rebelo et al, 2010). As AUC is not appropriate to evaluate the accuracy of binary predictions, we also used true skill statistic (TSS) as suggested by recent studies (Lobo et al, 2008;Li & Guo, 2013) to assess the accuracy of the bamboo species models.…”