Species extinction Rooms

Species extinction Rooms

December 2016 – Analysis of the ‘warm edge’ of the areal spread of terrestrial species, marine and freshwater reveals that local extinctions linked to climate change are already widespread.
Half the species on Earth is hit by local extinctions.

Almost half of all plant and animal species on the planet is affected by local extinctions linked to climate change. This was revealed by a study of 976 terrestrial species, marine and freshwater in the world, which analyzed the fluctuations in the extension of their distribution areas and tried to determine their causes.
Of these almost 1,000 species, as many as 47% has disappeared in some of its traditional areas of diffusion. Does not mean that the species is extinct altogether: the effects of this phenomenon are local, ie only in certain habitats conditions lead to the disappearance of a species, which continues to survive elsewhere.
The research was conducted by John Wiens, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and published in the Public Library of Science Biology. Has focused attention on so-called “warm edge”, literally “hot edge”: that is, those areas of the distribution boundary of a species where the environmental conditions in a given ecosystem become too hot for some species, which are then forced to migrate, or simply die out for lack of alternatives. The work of Wiens is based on studies already published and, in a sense, put them in the system by creating a global mapping of the phenomenon.

Guido Bissanti