Terrestrial Biodiversity Adaptation Research Network

"Global climate change threatens global biodiversity, ecosystem function, and human wellbeing, with thousands of publications demonstrating impacts across a wide diversity of taxonomic groups, ecosystems, economics, and social structure. A review by Hughes [1] identified many of the ways that organisms may be affected by and/ or respond to climate change. Since then, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of case studies attesting to ecological impacts [2], prompting several recent reviews on the subject (e.g., [3–6]). Several global meta-analyses confirm the pervasiveness of the global climate change “fingerprint” across continents, ecosystems, processes, and species [7–9]. Some studies have predicted increasingly severe future impacts with potentially high extinction rates in natural systems around the world [10,11]. Responding to this threat will require a concerted, multi-disciplinary, multi-scale, multi-taxon research effort that improves our predictive capacity to identify and prioritise vulnerable species in order to inform governments of the seriousness of the threat and to facilitate conservation adaptation and management [12,13]...."

Williams S.E., Shoo L.P., Isaac J., Hoffmann A.A. & Langham G. 2008. Toward an Integrated Framework for Assessing the Vulnerability of Species to Climate Change. PLOS Biology 6: 2621- 2

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