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Comparative Study
. 2005 Jul 22;272(1571):1427-32.
doi: 10.1098/rspb.2005.3119.

An ecological 'footprint' of climate change

Gian-Reto Walther  1 , Silje Berger, Martin T Sykes
Affiliations
Comparative Study

An ecological 'footprint' of climate change

Gian-Reto Walther et al. Proc Biol Sci. .

Abstract

Recently, there has been increasing evidence of species' range shifts due to changes in climate. Whereas most of these shifts relate ground truth biogeographic data to a general warming trend in regional or global climate data, we here present a reanalysis of both biogeographic and bioclimatic data of equal spatio-temporal resolution, covering a time span of more than 50 years. Our results reveal a coherent and synchronous shift in both species' distribution and climate. They show not only a shift in the northern margin of a species, which is in concert with gradually increasing winter temperatures in the area, they also confirm the simulated species' distribution changes expected from a bioclimatic model under the recent, relatively moderate climate change.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Distribution of Ilex aquifolium and the 0 °C-January isoline at different times. (a) Former range of I. aquifolium (dark grey shading) based on Enquist (1924) and Meusel et al. (1965), isoline based upon Walter & Straka (1970), symbols based upon Iversen (1944); for symbol legends see figure 2. (b) Modelled range of I. aquifolium in the recent past (1931–60; vertical shading), isoline as in (a). (c) Former range of I. aquifolium (dark grey shading) as in (a); isoline updated for 1981–2000 based on Mitchell et al. (2004), symbols updated; for symbol legends see figure 2. (d) Former range of I. aquifolium (dark grey shading) complemented with the simulated species' distribution under a moderate climate change based on 1981–2000 climate data (diagonal shading), isoline as in (c); triangles represent locations with new actual occurrences of I. aquifolium.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Thermal correlation diagram with Iversen (1944) values (grey symbols) and updated values (black symbols); the arrows link the values of corresponding stations. For details see text and Electronic Appendix A.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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