4.6 Editorial Material

Introduction to the theme issue 'Species' ranges in the face of changing environments'

Publisher

ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2021.0002

Keywords

limits to species' ranges; local adaptation; climate change evolution; range shift; range expansion and contraction; range fragmentation

Categories

Funding

  1. Hasselblad Foundation Grant for Female Scientists
  2. Swedish Research Council Formas [2019-00882]
  3. Swedish Research Council Vetenskapsradet [2021-05243]
  4. Formas
  5. European Research Council
  6. European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [678841]
  7. Vetenskapsradet
  8. Swedish Research Council [2021-05243] Funding Source: Swedish Research Council
  9. Formas [2019-00882] Funding Source: Formas

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Understanding species' range modifications is crucial for predicting the impact of environmental changes on biodiversity. Different species may respond differently to the same environmental changes, and changes in species' ranges create feedbacks to the environment, populations, and communities. Understanding these links is essential for biodiversity management and conservation efforts.
Understanding where, when and how species' ranges will be modified is both a fundamental problem and essential to predicting how spatio-temporal environmental changes in abiotic and biotic factors impact biodiversity. Notably, different species may respond disparately to similar environmental changes: some species may overcome an environmental change only with difficulty or not at all, while other species may readily overcome the same change. Ranges may contract, expand or move. The drivers and consequences of this variability in species' responses remain puzzling. Importantly, changes in a species' range creates feedbacks to the environmental conditions, populations and communities in its previous and current range, rendering population genetic, population dynamic and community processes inextricably linked. Understanding these links is critical in guiding biodiversity management and conservation efforts. This theme issue presents current thinking about the factors and mechanisms that limit and/or modify species' ranges. It also outlines different approaches to detect changes in species' distributions, and illustrates cases of range modifications in several taxa. Overall, this theme issue highlights the urgency of understanding species' ranges but shows that we are only just beginning to disentangle the processes involved. One way forward is to unite ecology with evolutionary biology and empirical with modelling approaches. This article is part of the theme issue 'Species' ranges in the face of changing environments (Part II)'.

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