We’ve had a visiting researcher with us this week, Dr Piero Visconti, from the Global Mammal Assessment programme, Sapienza University of Rome (http://globalmammal.org/staff/piero-visconti/). I invited him over for some collaborative research and to get to know our crew in general, as we clearly have many shared interests. Piero gave a talk at the department with a slightly provocative title: “Mitigating future biodiversity loss, how much can protected areas do?” Mammal conservation clearly attracts people, as we had a full house at the seminar even though it’s mid-June and the department appears half empty. Piero has selected the paper for this week’s journal club, and will make a guest appearance in the blog shortly!
Tag Archives: mammals
Wright et al. 2009: The Future of Tropic…
Wright et al. 2009: The Future of Tropical Species on a Warmer Planet
This is a paper we decided to read because some papers we have previously read cited it. We thought the topic was interesting because it highlighted the tropical areas and the tropical species in relation to climate change. The authors suggest that tropical species may be particularly sensitive to global warming because of a number of factors, such as a species’ sensitivity to temperature change and proximity to cooler refuges. The analysis was done for the extant mammals and with a moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario. Unfortunately the paper was very heavy to read and included many different aspects with land cover types, distances to potential cool refuges and habitat associations. It was difficult to keep track of what underlying data and assumptions that were behind the figures. This meant that although the paper did have some interesting points, the authors did not manage to open them up for the reader. One issue that was not discussed at all was the fact that although tropical species might be poorly adapted to changes in temperature, they are likely to be highly adapted to changes is precipitation. The paper also did not address the question what will happen with the areas where there now has been high species richness and centers of speciation, i.e. what will come in the place of the tropical species? We also saw some concerns about technical things, such as having 1960s temperatures but land use data from the 2000, and using annual mean temperatures for the analyses. Additionally, when looking at the map in figure 5 some of use pointed out that it merely seems to be a question about altitude, rather than latitude. Especially when comparing the figure to maps of present day topography of the earth. The green areas (i.e. those with least distance to refuges) are all situated in mostly mountainous areas, and do not, as the authors claim, seem to be much related to latitudes.
Wright, S.J., Muller-Landau, H.C., Schipper, J. 2009: The Future of Tropical Species on a Warmer Planet. Conservation Biology 23: 1418-1426.
doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01337.x