Projecting global marine biodiversity impacts under climate change scenarios

TLDR

Climate change alters marine species distributions, yet global studies of its biodiversity impacts are lacking. The study aims to project global patterns of climate‑change impacts on 1066 exploited marine species by 2050 using a new dynamic bioclimate envelope model. The authors employ a newly developed dynamic bioclimate envelope model to forecast 2050 distributional ranges for these species. Projections show that climate change will cause widespread local extinctions in sub‑polar, tropical, and semi‑enclosed seas, intense invasions in the Arctic and Southern Ocean, and over 60% turnover of current biodiversity, potentially disrupting ecosystem services and providing hypotheses for future research.

Abstract

Abstract Climate change can impact the pattern of marine biodiversity through changes in species’ distributions. However, global studies on climate change impacts on ocean biodiversity have not been performed so far. Our paper aims to investigate the global patterns of such impacts by projecting the distributional ranges of a sample of 1066 exploited marine fish and invertebrates for 2050 using a newly developed dynamic bioclimate envelope model. Our projections show that climate change may lead to numerous local extinction in the sub‐polar regions, the tropics and semi‐enclosed seas. Simultaneously, species invasion is projected to be most intense in the Arctic and the Southern Ocean. Together, they result in dramatic species turnovers of over 60% of the present biodiversity, implying ecological disturbances that potentially disrupt ecosystem services. Our projections can be viewed as a set of hypothesis for future analytical and empirical studies.