Climate change drives expansion of Antarctic ice-free habitat

Jasmine R. Lee (), Ben Raymond, Thomas J. Bracegirdle, Iadine Chadès, Richard A. Fuller, Justine D. Shaw and Aleks Terauds
Additional contact information
Jasmine R. Lee: Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland
Ben Raymond: Australian Antarctic Division, Department of the Environment and Energy
Thomas J. Bracegirdle: British Antarctic Survey
Iadine Chadès: CSIRO
Richard A. Fuller: Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland
Justine D. Shaw: Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland
Aleks Terauds: Australian Antarctic Division, Department of the Environment and Energy

Nature, 2017, vol. 547, issue 7661, 49-54

Abstract: Abstract 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 km2 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.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22996 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:547:y:2017:i:7661:d:10.1038_nature22996

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature22996

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().