Climate Change and Biogeography

Abstract

Biogeographers have long studied physical and biological factors that determine the distribution of species at local, regional, and global scales. This interest initially focused on contemporary species distributions, but as high quality fossil evidence became available biogeographers expanded their research into temporal patterns, often extending to the start of the Holocene or even into the Pleistocene in some locations. Specifically, in the latter decades of the twentieth century research extended to describing the dynamics of species ranges associated with past climates (glacial periods) and species' response to warming in the Holocene. More recently, since anthropogenic climate change has been recognized as a potential driver of environmental change in the coming century, biogeographers have applied what has been learned about species' responses to postglacial warming to describing species' response to recent warming and modeling ecosystem reactions to future climate change.