Climate Upsets: Big model predicts many new neighbors
By Susan Milius
For wildlife, the biggest wallop from global climate change may not be species extinctions but major shifts in the make-up of creature communities.
That’s the prediction from the most ambitious application yet of the computer model for climate change and biodiversity developed by A. Townsend Peterson of the University of Kansas in Lawrence and his colleagues. They started with information on the current ranges of 1,870 birds, mammals, and butterflies in Mexico. Their model crunched the information under various scenarios of climate change to predict the ranges of the species in 2055.