Extinction debt from climate change for frogs in the wet tropics.

ABSTRACT: The effect of twenty-first-century climate change on biodiversity is commonly forecast based on modelled shifts in species ranges, linked to habitat suitability. These projections have been coupled with species-area relationships (SAR) to infer extinction rates indirectly as a result of the loss of climatically suitable areas and associated habitat. This approach does not model population dynamics explicitly, and so accepts that extinctions might occur after substantial (but unknown) delays-an extinction debt. Here we explicitly couple bioclimatic envelope models of climate and habitat suitability with generic life-history models for 24 species of frogs found in the Australian Wet Tropics (AWT). We show that (i) as many as four species of frogs face imminent extinction by 2080, due primari

SUBMITTER: Fordham DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5095186 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature