Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lee, Jasmine R
• Raymond, Ben
• Bracegirdle, Thomas J
• Chadès, Iadine
• Fuller, Richard A
• Shaw, Justine D
• Terauds, Aleks

Titel

Climate change drives expansion of Antarctic ice-free habitat

Ist Teil von

• Nature (London), 2017-07, Vol.547 (7661), p.49-54

Ort / Verlag

England: Nature Publishing Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Antarctic terrestrial biodiversity occurs almost exclusively in ice-free areas that cover less than 1% of the continent. Climate change will alter the extent and configuration of ice-free areas, yet the distribution and severity of these effects remain unclear. Here we quantify the impact of twenty-first century climate change on ice-free areas under two Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate forcing scenarios using temperature-index melt modelling. Under the strongest forcing scenario, ice-free areas could expand by over 17,000 km by the end of the century, close to a 25% increase. Most of this expansion will occur in the Antarctic Peninsula, where a threefold increase in ice-free area could drastically change the availability and connectivity of biodiversity habitat. Isolated ice-free areas will coalesce, and while the effects on biodiversity are uncertain, we hypothesize that they could eventually lead to increasing regional-scale biotic homogenization, the extinction of less-competitive species and the spread of invasive species.