Distribution trends of European dragonflies under climate change

Climate change is driving latitudinal and altitudinal shifts in species distribution worldwide, leading to novel species assemblages. Lags between these biotic responses and contemporary climate changes have been reported for plants and animals. Theoretically, the magnitude of these lags should be greatest in lowland areas, where the velocity of climate change is expected to be much greater than that in highland areas. We compared temperature trends to temperatures reconstructed from plant assemblages (observed in 76,634 surveys) over a 44-year period in France (1965-2008). Here we report that forest plant communities had responded to 0.54 °C of the effective increase of 1.07 °C in highland areas (500-2,600 m above sea level), while they had responded to only 0.02 °C of the 1.11 °C warming trend in lowland areas. There was a larger temperature lag (by 3.1 times) between the climate and plant community composition in lowland forests than in highland forests. The explanation of such disparity lies in the following properties of lowland, as compared to highland, forests: the higher proportion of species with greater ability for local persistence as the climate warms, the reduced opportunity for short-distance escapes, and the greater habitat fragmentation. Although mountains are currently considered to be among the ecosystems most threatened by climate change (owing to mountaintop extinction), the current inertia of plant communities in lowland forests should also be noted, as it could lead to lowland biotic attrition. ©2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved

Range shifts of many species are now documented as a response to global warming. But whether these observed changes are occurring fast enough remains uncertain and hardly quantifiable. Here, we developed a simple framework to measure change in community composition in response to climate warming. This framework is based on a community temperature index (CTI) that directly reflects, for a given species assemblage, the balance between low- and high-temperature dwelling species. Using data from the French breeding bird survey, we first found a strong increase in CTI over the last two decades revealing that birds are rapidly tracking climate warming. This increase corresponds to a 91 km northward shift in bird community composition, which is much higher than previous estimates based on changes in species range edges. During the same period, temperature increase corresponds to a 273 km northward shift in temperature. Change in community composition was thus insufficient to keep up with temperature increase: birds are lagging approximately 182 km behind climate warming. Our method is applicable to any taxa with large-scale survey data, using either abundance or occurrence data. This approach can be further used to test whether different delays are found across groups or in different land-use contexts.