Climate warming drives local extinction: Evidence from observation and experimentation

Climate warming causes plant populations to crash by reducing fecundity and survival across multiple life stages. Despite increasing concern about elevated extinction risk as global temperatures rise, it is difficult to confirm causal links between climate change and extinction. By coupling 25 years of in situ climate manipulation with experimental seed introductions and both historical and current plant surveys, we identify causal, mechanistic links between climate change and the local extinction of a widespread mountain plant (Androsace septentrionalis). Climate warming causes precipitous declines in population size by reducing fecundity and survival across multiple life stages. Climate warming also purges belowground seed banks, limiting the potential for the future recovery of at-risk populations under ameliorated conditions. Bolstered by previous reports of plant community shifts in this experiment and in other habitats, our findings not only support the hypothesis that climate change can drive local extinction but also foreshadow potentially widespread species losses in subalpine meadows as climate warming continues.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Science Advances

• Publication date

  2018-02-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aaq1819PMID 29507884PMCID 5833995
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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