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Download fileInteracting effects of climate change and habitat fragmentation on drought-sensitive butterflies
journal contribution
posted on 2016-04-15, 14:55 authored by Tom H. Oliver, Harry H. Marshall, Mike D. Morecroft, Tom Brereton, Christel Prudhomme, Chris Huntingford© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of some climatic extremes. These may have drastic impacts on biodiversity, particularly if meteorological thresholds are crossed, leading to population collapses. Should this occur repeatedly, populations may be unable to recover, resulting in local extinctions. Comprehensive time series data on butterflies in Great Britain provide a rare opportunity to quantify population responses to both past severe drought and the interaction with habitat area and fragmentation. Here, we combine this knowledge with future projections from multiple climate models, for different Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), and for simultaneous modelled responses to different landscape characteristics. Under RCP8.5, which is associated with business as usual'emissions, widespread drought-sensitive butterfly population extinctions could occur as early as 2050. However, by managing landscapes and particularly reducing habitat fragmentation, the probability of persistence until mid-century improves from around zero to between 6 and 42% (95% confidence interval). Achieving persistence with a greater than 50% chance and right through to 2100 is possible only under both low climate change (RCP2.6) and semi-natural habitat restoration. Our data show that, for these drought-sensitive butterflies, persistence is achieved more effectively by restoring semi-natural landscapes to reduce fragmentation, rather than simply focusing on increasing habitat area, but this will only be successful in combination with substantial emission reductions.
Funding
This research was partly funded by Natural England Project ref. 24802 and partly by NERC CEH national capability funding.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Geography and Environment
Published in
Nature Climate ChangeVolume
5Issue
10Pages
941 - 946Citation
OLIVER, T.H. ...et al., 2015. Interacting effects of climate change and habitat fragmentation on drought-sensitive butterflies. Nature Climate Change, 5(10), pp. 941-946.Publisher
© 2015 Macmillan Publishers LimitedVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2015Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Nature Climate Change and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2746ISSN
1758-678XeISSN
1758-6798Publisher version
Language
- en