Half of Species Moving Wrong Way on Warming — SkimNews
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- Ecologists tracking global range shifts have found that up to half of studied species are moving downhill or toward the equator instead of into cooler climates — including a quarter that moved downhill in a landmark 2011 analysis by Chris Thomas at the University of York.
- Toni Lyn Morelli at the University of Massachusetts Amherst discovered that American red squirrels in the northeastern US have begun moving downhill despite warming — the opposite of what was expected — defying predictions about predation pressure on Bicknell's thrush.
- Chris Thomas and colleagues (2011) revised the estimated rate of uphill/poleward shifts upward to an average of 11 meters uphill or 17 kilometers poleward per decade and identified the first causal link between warming and shift magnitude — yet a quarter of tracked species still moved the wrong way.
- Steve Beissinger at UC Berkeley found that in Yosemite National Park, half of 28 small mammal species hadn't moved at all since early-20th-century surveys by biologist Joseph Grinnell, and two shrew species had expanded downslope.
- Beissinger's Sierra Nevada study of white-headed woodpeckers found discrete populations responding differently within one range — uphill in the north, downhill in the middle, nowhere in the south — leading researchers to conclude that precipitation changes can override temperature as a predictor.
- Beissinger's Mojave desert research found bird populations "collapsing" under 2°C of warming while small mammals thrived, because mammals shelter from 45°C heat in burrows while birds "air-fry overhead" — illustrating how exposure differences complicate predictions.
- Researchers including Lise Comte of Conservation Science Partners say attempts to predict range shifts using behavioral traits like "live fast, die young" species characteristics "don't really work super well," leaving the field without a reliable forecasting formula.
- Conservationists have spent years buying up land in cooler areas assumed to become climate refuges — but Inna Osmolovsky of the University of New South Wales says scientists are now "left with more questions than answers" about where to actually protect.
Why it matters: Land managers have been buying cooler terrain they assumed species would flee to — if up to half of species are actually moving downhill, toward the equator, or staying put, that money may be protecting the wrong places. The finding also exposes how crude single-variable models (temperature alone) have guided three decades of climate conservation strategy, forcing a shift toward habitat connectivity and more complex, multi-factor planning.
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