Contemporary climate change is expected to affect the distributions of most species, but the nature, tempo, and mechanics of contemporary range shifts are still largely speculative. Here, we use fine-scale distributional records developed over the past Century, combined with spatially comprehensive microclimatic data, to demonstrate a dramatic shift in the range of a climate-sensitive mammal and to infer the increasingly important role of climate in local extinctions of this species across a 38.2 million-ha area. Changes in the distribution of the American pika (Ochotona princeps) throughout the Great Basin ecoregion were characterized using records from 1898-2008, revealing a nearly five-fold increase in the rate of local extinction and an 11-fold increase in the rate of upslope range retraction during the last ten years, compared with during the 20th Century. Four of ten local pika extinctions have occurred since 1999, and across this ecoregion the low-elevation range boundary for this species is now moving upslope at an average rate of about 145 m per decade. The rapid, ecoregional range shift of this small, talus-dwelling species stands in remarkable contrast with the dynamics and determinants of endangerment previously observed for most terrestrial species, and to earlier extinction determinants for O. princeps in this region. Further investigation of widely distributed species will clarify rates at which biotic response to environmental change is occurring, and how factors driving that change are evolving in different portions of the earth.

Biotic responses to climate change will vary among taxa and across latitudes, elevational gradients, and degrees of insularity. However, due to factors such as phenotypic plasticity, ecotypic variation, and evolved tolerance to thermal stress, it remains poorly understood whether losses should be greatest in populations experiencing the greatest climatic change or living in places where the prevailing climate is closest to the edge of the species' bioclimatic envelope (e.g., at the hottest, driest sites). Research on American pikas (Ochotona princeps) in montane areas of the Great Basin during 1994-1999 suggested that 20th-century population extirpations were predicted by a combination of biogeographic, anthropogenic, and especially climatic factors. Surveys during 2005-2007 documented additional extirpations and within-site shifts of pika distributions at remaining sites. To evaluate the evidence in support of alternative hypotheses involving effects of thermal stress on pikas, we placed temperature sensors at 156 locations within pika habitats in the vicinity of 25 sites with historical records of pikas in the Basin. We related these time series of sensor data to data on ambient temperature from weather stations within the Historical Climate Network. We then used these highly correlated relationships, combined with long-term data from the same weather stations, to hindcast temperatures within pika habitats from 1945 through 2006. To explain patterns of loss, we posited three alternative classes of direct thermal stress: (1) acute cold stress (number of days below a threshold temperature); (2) acute heat stress (number of days above a threshold temperature); and (3) chronic heat stress (average summer temperature). Climate change was defined as change in our thermal metrics between two 31-yr periods: 1945-1975 and 1976-2006. We found that patterns of persistence were well predicted by metrics of climate. Our best models suggest some effects of climate change; however, recent and long-term metrics of chronic heat stress and acute cold stress, neither previously recognized as sources of stress for pikas, were some of the best predictors of pika persistence. Results illustrate that extremely rapid distributional shifts can be explained by climatic influences and have implications for conservation topics such as reintroductions and early-warning indicators.

No abstract

C ontemporary ecosystem change driven by a suite of global anthropogenic stressors has had reverberating consequences across genetic, population, community, and ecoregional scales (Díaz et al. 2019). Fine-scale changes in phenology, morphology, abundance, gene frequencies, and distribution of populations and species (eg Staudinger et al. 2013) can scale up to system-level conversions and biome shifts (Scheffer et al. 2009). Often driven by changing climate, many of these changes are manifest in ecological and physical stresses, including invasive-plant incursions, drought, desertification, severe fire, pest outbreaks, and geographic displacement of species. Extreme ecosystem changes are occurring with increasing frequency across a range of biomes, including coral bleaching in the tropics and grassification of shrublands (Figure 1). Ecosystem changes are expected to continue across many biomes even under scenarios with aggressive reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, with globally distributed and radical ecosystem alterations predicted under high-emission scenarios (Nolan et al. 2018;Reid et al. 2018).We define these intensive and comprehensive system changes as ecosystem transformation (ie the emergence of a selforganizing, self-sustaining ecological or socioecological system that diverges considerably and irreversibly from prior historical ecosystem structure, composition, and function; Noss 1990). Transformations include ecosystem disruptions (eg Embrey et al. 2012) and occur across a range of temporal scales -for instance, from single-event high-intensity fires (Guiterman et al. 2018) to glacial-interglacial transitions spanning many millennia (Nolan et al. 2018) -and range widely in spatial extent, from a local community to entire biomes (Thompson et al. 2021). These changes pose critical threats to ecosystem services and consequently to human health and well-being, clean air and water, food security, sanitation, and disease mitigation (Whitmee et al. 2015).