Global temperatures are rising, and organisms are trying to adapt. One way is by shifting their habitat, in order to find a suitable spot with temperatures suiting their activities and life cycle. In a new paper in Nature Climate Change, Benjamin Kraemer et al. used 32 million temperature measurements from 139 lakes in order to quantify thermal habitat change from 1978 to 2013.
They found that the change was largest in tropical lakes, and that lakes with high thermal habitat change coincided with these having numerous endemic species. Taken together, this means that conservation actions should consider thermal habitat change.
The press release about the article can be read here (at the web page of IGB Berlin), and a News and Views article written by Gretchen Hansen can be read here (link to web page of Nature Climate Change).
The lead author has made a mini-lecture on the paper, which is available here on YouTube.
CBA leader Dag O. Hessen is a co-author on the paper and can be contacted here (link to his web page).
Read the paper itself here (link to Kraemer et al 2021).