Temperate and tropical lizards are vulnerable to climate warming due to increased water loss and heat stress

Abstract

Climate warming has imposed profound impacts on species globally. Understanding the vulnerabilities of species from different latitudinal regions to warming climates is critical for biological conservation. Using five species of Takydromus lizards as a study system, we quantified physiological and life-history responses and geography range change across latitudes under climate warming. Using integrated biophysical models and hybrid species distribution models, we found: (i) thermal safety margin is larger at high latitudes and is predicted to decrease under climate warming for lizards at all latitudes; (ii) climate warming will speed up embryonic development and increase annual activity time of adult lizards, but will exacerbate water loss of adults across all latitudes; and (iii) species across latitudes are predicted to experience habitat contraction under climate warming due to different limitations—tropical and subtropical species are vulnerable due to increased extremely high temperatures, whereas temperate species are vulnerable due to both extremely high temperatures and increased water loss. This study provides a comprehensive understanding of the vulnerability of species from different latitudinal regions to climate warming in ectotherms, and also highlights the importance of integrating environmental factors, behaviour, physiology and life-history responses in predicting the risk of species to climate warming.

Distinct responses and range shifts of lizard populations across an elevational gradient under climate change

“…We generated a response curve for each variable used in the ensemble model (Figure S5), by setting other variables as constant to the mean values and allowing only the focused variable to vary across its whole range (Ma et al, 2021;Mi et al, 2022). Suitable habitats were lost or gained due to changes in ecophysiological responses and bioclimatic variables.…”

“…The impact of climate change on species will ultimately lead to changes in the availability of suitable habitat. Species' traits may determine ecophysiological responses (e.g., activity times, water loss) (Enriquez-Urzelai et al, 2019;Rubalcaba et al, 2019), which in turn may affect range shifts under climate change (Buckley et al, 2015;Mi et al, 2022;Newman et al, 2022). We know that current distribution boundaries of marine species are limited by their metabolic traits and will likely be further constrained by climate change (Deutsch et al, 2015(Deutsch et al, , 2020.…”

“…However, multiple physiological traits (e.g., thermal tolerance, metabolic traits) in addition to body temperature are expected to affect the related ecophysiological responses and therefore the impact of climate change (Deutsch et al, 2015;Mi et al, 2022). Thus, a comprehensive assessment of climate change impacts based on multiple physiological traits is needed.…”

Mechanistic forecasts of species responses to climate change: The promise of biophysical ecology

“…An often discussed but seldom implemented approach to expanding biophysical modeling approaches is “hybrid” models, which use computational pattern‐based approaches to inform uncertain or unknown parameters or relationships (Buckley et al, 2010; Dormann et al, 2012). The most common strategy is to include mechanistically derived layers (such as potential activity durations, heat units available for development, incidence of stressful environmental conditions, or energy balances) as predictors in correlative species distribution models (Mathewson et al, 2017; Mi et al, 2022). While these methods are still closer to the statistical end of the spectrum (i.e., the data lead the dance), using mechanistically derived layers that translate time series of environmental conditions into metrics of fitness relevant to the species should help these models predict more reliably to novel conditions.…”

Global Protected Areas as refuges for amphibians and reptiles under climate change

“…We selected these four scenarios because they span a wide range of plausible global change futures, and serve as the basis for climate model projections 28,51 . We averaged the climate data across the three GCMs for each grid to reduce uncertainties among modeling techniques 29,59,88 . We projected all climate layers to Eckert IV equal-area projection 67 with 1 km × 1 km grid resolution.…”