Climate warming is causing many species to shift their geographic ranges, and it is not clear what the long-term consequences of these shifts will be in terms of the population dynamics of these species. Will species keep up with the change and survive or will their population decline and eventually go extinct? While many quantitative models have been developed to study range shifts, I will spend the majority of this talk on presenting some simple mathematical models about the population dynamics of a general single-species population under climate-induced range shifts.
Results/Conclusions
The models show that the speed of climate warming, the size of the range and species’ dispersal ability are all important factors when considering the question. When the speed of the range shift is assumed to be constant, along with some other simplifying assumptions, the population is shown to lag behind the shifting suitable range, but the lag seems to stabilize over time. In addition, when there is an acceleration in the range shifting speed, the population seems to decline to a larger extent compared with a constant-speed shifting scenario over the same distance in the same amount of time.