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      Making mistakes when predicting shifts in species range in response to global warming.

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          Abstract

          Many attempts to predict the biotic responses to climate change rely on the 'climate envelope' approach, in which the current distribution of a species is mapped in climate-space and then, if the position of that climate-space changes, the distribution of the species is predicted to shift accordingly. The flaw in this approach is that distributions of species also reflect the influence of interactions with other species, so predictions based on climate envelopes may be very misleading if the interactions between species are altered by climate change. An additional problem is that current distributions may be the result of sources and sinks, in which species appear to thrive in places where they really persist only because individuals disperse into them from elsewhere. Here we use microcosm experiments on simple but realistic assemblages to show how misleading the climate envelope approach can be. We show that dispersal and interactions, which are important elements of population dynamics, must be included in predictions of biotic responses to climate change.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          Nature
          Nature
          Springer Science and Business Media LLC
          0028-0836
          0028-0836
          Feb 19 1998
          : 391
          : 6669
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Ecology and Evolution Group, Biology Department, The University, Leeds, Yorkshire, UK. a.j.davis@leeds.ac.uk
          Article
          10.1038/35842
          9486646
          3111da97-90a2-4f7e-9052-2d9a64c2ff13
          History

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