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An ecological 'footprint' of climate change.

Walther GR, Berger S, Sykes MT

Institute of Geobotany, University of Hannover, Nienburger Street 17, 30167 Hannover, Germany. walther@geobotanik.uni-hannover.de

Recently, there has been increasing evidence of species' range shifts due to changes in climate. Whereas most of these shifts relate ground truth biogeographic data to a general warming trend in regional or global climate data, we here present a reanalysis of both biogeographic and bioclimatic data of equal spatio-temporal resolution, covering a time span of more than 50 years. Our results reveal a coherent and synchronous shift in both species' distribution and climate. They show not only a shift in the northern margin of a species, which is in concert with gradually increasing winter temperatures in the area, they also confirm the simulated species' distribution changes expected from a bioclimatic model under the recent, relatively moderate climate change.

Published 13 July 2005 in Proc Biol Sci, 272(1571): 1427-32.
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