Document Type
Article
Journal/Book Title/Conference
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Author ORCID Identifier
Margaret E. K. Evans https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3220-3382
Sharmila M. N. Dey https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9176-4695
Kelly A. Heilman https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5932-1317
R. Justin DeRose https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4849-7744
Stefan Kleese https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1569-1724
Emily L. Schultz https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0426-2513
John D. Shaw https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5797-1006
Volume
121
Issue
24
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Publication Date
6-3-2024
Journal Article Version
Version of Record
First Page
1
Last Page
8
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Abstract
Given the importance of climate in shaping species' geographic distributions, climate change poses an existential threat to biodiversity. Climate envelope modeling, the predominant approach used to quantify this threat, presumes that individuals in populations respond to climate variability and change according to species-level responses inferred from spatial occurrence data—such that individuals at the cool edge of a species' distribution should benefit from warming (the "leading edge"), whereas individuals at the warm edge should suffer (the "trailing edge"). Using 1,558 tree-ring time series of an aridland pine (Pinus edulis) collected at 977 locations across the species' distribution, we found that trees everywhere grow less in warmer-than-average and drier-than-average years. Ubiquitous negative temperature sensitivity indicates that individuals across the entire distribution should suffer with warming—the entire distribution is a trailing edge. Species-level responses to spatial climate variation are opposite in sign to individual-scale responses to time-varying climate for approximately half the species' distribution with respect to temperature and the majority of the species' distribution with respect to precipitation. These findings, added to evidence from the literature for scale-dependent climate responses in hundreds of species, suggest that correlative, equilibrium-based range forecasts may fail to accurately represent how individuals in populations will be impacted by changing climate. A scale-dependent view of the impact of climate change on biodiversity highlights the transient risk of extinction hidden inside climate envelope forecasts and the importance of evolution in rescuing species from extinction whenever local climate variability and change exceeds individual-scale climate tolerances.
Recommended Citation
M.E.K. Evans, S.M.N. Dey, K.A. Heilman, J.R. Tipton, R.J. DeRose, S. Klesse, E.L. Schultz, J.D. Shaw, Tree rings reveal the transient risk of extinction hidden inside climate envelope forecasts, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121 (24) e2315700121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2315700121 (2024).
