A new study conducted by a joint team of international team of scientists and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) shows that global warming has adversely affected the distribution of plant and animal life around the world.
The study, which was published in the online journal Nature, details how climate change is affecting the distribution of flora and fauna in certain countries such as Australia. The team also released new maps showing the direction of local climate shifts.
"The reorganization of patterns of species diversity driven by anthropogenic climate change, and the consequences for humans, are not yet fully understood or appreciated," said the team in their study. "Nevertheless, changes in climate conditions are useful for predicting shifts in species distributions at global and local scales."
The team of researchers gathered and analyzed data regarding sea surface temperatures from a period of time between 1960 and 2009. The team then overlaid its findings on a map of Australia illustrating that the changes in climate patterns were particularly pronounced in certain parts of Australia including the central eastern part of the country as well as the north western sections of Australia.
The most drastic changes in climate have occurred in the inland parts of Australia and the researchers warned that "considerable climate migration" might occur. Since the Murray Darling Basin has been affected by the changes, the effect can be potentially dangerous considering that over 30 percent of the food grown in Australia comes from the region.
"As species move to track their ideal temperature conditions, they will sometimes run into what we call a 'climate sink,' where the preferred climate simply disappears leaving species nowhere to go because they are up against a coastline or other barrier," said National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) associate Carrie Kappel, who is also one of the co-authors of the study. "There are a number of those sinks around the world where movement is blocked by a coastline, like in the northern Adriatic Sea or the northern Gulf of Mexico, and there's no way out because it's warmer everywhere behind."
The researchers also conducted simulations regarding possible increases in temperature in Australia. The team found that the size of the sections affected by species migration might grow in terms of land area in the next few decades.
"The writing is on the wall: species have already started moving in response to climate change," said study co-author Prof. Ben Halpern from the University of California, Santa Barbara's (UCSB) Bren School of Environmental Science & Management . "We can either sit back and watch as species get squeezed out of existence and food webs reshuffle or we can try to be proactive in designing conservation strategies. Our research and maps offer a window into what the future of biodiversity will look like, and we have a chance to improve the view from that window."
