Scorching heat waves, severe cold snaps, and other extreme weather events are limiting where species can exist - and affecting biodiversity estimates - for more than 500 North American bird species, according to a new, Yale-led study.
The issue is particularly acute in the Great Plains and southwestern regions of the United States, where species ranges and total species counts are significantly overestimated when variable and extreme weather are not considered, the study says.
The findings were published in the journal Global Change Biology.
"We all know extreme weather is on the rise with climate change," said Jeremy Cohen, the study's lead author. He is an associate research scientist in Yale's Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, a member of the lab of co-author and Yale professor Walter Jetz, and part of the Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change. "This is the first study to look at how increasingly variable and extreme weather affects avian biodiversity at a continental scale."
Cohen, whose specialty is macroecology, uses large ecological datasets, remote sensing data, and species distribution models to study how climate change affects wildlife at continental and sometimes global scales.
