PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Carolina Ureta
AU  - Santiago Ramírez-Barahona
AU  - Óscar Calderón-Bustamante
AU  - Pedro Cruz-Santiago
AU  - Carlos Gay-García
AU  - Didier Swingedouw
AU  - Dimitri DeFrance
AU  - Angela P. Cuervo-Robayo
TI  - Greenland’s thaw pushes the biodiversity crisis
AID  - 10.1101/2021.06.10.447623
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.06.10.447623
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/06/11/2021.06.10.447623.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/06/11/2021.06.10.447623.full
AB  - Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have led to sustained global warming over the last decades1. This is already reshaping the distribution of biodiversity across the world and can lead to the occurrence of large-scale singular events, such as the melting of polar ice sheets2,3. The potential impacts of such a melting event on species persistence across taxonomic groups – in terms of magnitude and geographic extent – remain unexplored. Here we assess impacts on biodiversity of global warming and melting of Greenland’s ice sheet on the distribution of 21,146 species of vascular plants and tetrapods across twelve megadiverse countries. We show that high global warming would lead to widespread reductions in species’ geographic ranges (median range loss, 35–78%), which are magnified (median range loss, 95–99%) with the added contribution of Greenland’s melting and its potentially large impact on oceanic circulation and regional climate changes. Our models project a decline in the geographical extent of species hotspots across countries (median reduction, 48–95%) and a substantial alteration of species composition in the near future (mean temporal dissimilarity, 0.26–0.89). These results imply that, in addition to global warming, the influence of Greenland’s melting can lead to the collapse of biodiversity across the globe, providing an added domino in its cascading effects.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.