Biodiversity at the Tipping Point?

Rising temperatures worldwide are already causing significant shifts in the distribution ranges of plant and animal species (range-shifts). Paleontology also knows this phenomenon from earlier phases of global warming. Migration and dispersal of warmth-loving species that have been carried away by the movement of human goods will give rise to communities of organisms of hitherto unknown composition (novel communities), about whose stability little is known today. At the same time, the temporal sequences are also shifting. The formerly synchronized occurrence of plant and animal species increasingly no longer matches (mismatch). The effects of climate change first show up in individuals, depending on their genetic characteristics, and then propagate, bottom-up, through populations to ecosystems in which many individuals of different species interact with each other. During extreme climatic events such as marine or terrestrial heat waves, mass mortality events can occur, as recently in the Pacific Northwest. Climate change is not the cause of the biodiversity crisis we are currently experiencing but threatens to dramatically exacerbate it in future.