These Maps Show Where Climate Change Will Force Species to Die

As the Earth warms, we know it’s going to have a major impact on the ranges of animals and other living species, but a new study by an international group of scientists gives us more insight into how it’s all going to actually go down.

The group, headed by Michael Burrows of the Scottish Marine Institute, took a look at sea ocean data and several climate models and used them to “infer changes in species distribution” on a global scale. The resulting maps, published in Nature, divides the entire globe into a series of cells labeled as either “convergent,” meaning the area will gain more species than it loses; “divergent,” meaning it loses more than it gains; and “sources,” if no species were expected to move there.

The maps also predict the direction and speed of migration, as harder hit areas will lose more species at a faster rate than others. Finally, they show a series of “sinks,” where species are likely to concentrate and may eventually may die off.

“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 Carrie Kappel, a researcher at the University of California Santa Barbara who worked on the paper.

As Kappel said, these barriers are most likely to occur on coastlines, where species are essentially migrating to avoid warmer temperatures or a certain climate. Once they bump up against the coast, they’re pretty much out of luck. Kappel says similar things can happen when species move into higher elevations in order to survive, but ultimately end up with nowhere left to go, and can happen when they bump up against mountains and are unable to cross them. “There’s no way out because it’s warmer everywhere behind,” Kappel said.

The group uses Australia as a particularly detailed example, partly because the country has been one of the hardest-hit by climate change, but also because its terrestrial ecosystems are fairly well understood. The group predicts a coastal climate sink along the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north of the country, migration radiating out from the center of the country towards the coasts, and a loss of biodiversity along the country’s east coast. Wide swaths of the outback should see little or no change according to their models.

The global maps cover both ocean and terrestrial species. They’re a bit less detailed and are harder to read than Australia’s, but they mirror what we know about climate change already: Africa is expected to be hit particularly hard, with much of sub-Saharan Africa considered a “source,” where no species will be expected to migrate towards. The coasts are expected to see fewer species shifts and a slower-moving trajectory.

Parts of the Amazon are also expected to be hit pretty hard, with much of the northeastern part of it considered a climate source. Mountain ecosystems in the Andes and the Himalayas are considered “non moving” and aren’t expected to see much of a species shift, perhaps because there’s not a whole lot that can survive up there already.

Much of the United States and Canada is expected to see slow-moving species shifts, with parts of the Midwest expected to be hit slightly harder. In the oceans, all along the equator is considered a source, with parts of the southern hemispheres’ oceans expected to see much of the migration.

Kappel says that the map can help countries plan and that much of the map came from things climatologists have already been seeing.

“We know that many species have shifted where they live in ways that match the pattern of temperature change over the last 60 years,” she said. “This gives us confidence we can base conservation planning on what we’ve learned about what’s already happening.”

@jason_koebler