RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Greenland’s thaw pushes the biodiversity crisis
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.06.10.447623
DO 10.1101/2021.06.10.447623
A1 Carolina Ureta
A1 Santiago Ramírez-Barahona
A1 Óscar Calderón-Bustamante
A1 Pedro Cruz-Santiago
A1 Carlos Gay-García
A1 Didier Swingedouw
A1 Dimitri DeFrance
A1 Angela P. Cuervo-Robayo
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/06/11/2021.06.10.447623.abstract
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.