Cities can expect mass species turnover in a warming world
The Peninsula
Peregrine falcons perched atop towering skyscrapers. Coyotes caught on camera playing in someone s backyard. The pale green wings of a cabbage white b...
Peregrine falcons perched atop towering skyscrapers. Coyotes caught on camera playing in someone’s backyard. The pale green wings of a cabbage white butterfly perched on a flower blossom. Urban areas are awash in wildlife that faces growing pressures due to climate change, according to a study published today in PLOS ONE. The research, which looked at climate impacts on everything from mammals to insects in 60 of the most populous cities across the US and Canada, found that a warming world is moving many animals out of their historical geographic ranges and into new ones.
"Within a few years, the animals that you feed at your bird feeder might look very different,” said Alessandro Filazzola, the study’s lead author, who completed the research while he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Centre for Urban Environments.
Filazzola and his team leveraged data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, which pulls data from community science apps like iNaturalist and eBird, to estimate roughly how many species are currently present in urban areas. They then paired that information with United Nations climate projections known as shared socioeconomic pathways, or SSPs. The researchers looked at what happened to wildlife under three different scenarios, from moderate warming of 1.4C over pre-industrial levels by 2100 - in line with the Paris Climate Agreement - to a mid-range warming of 3.6C to the most extreme possible warming of 4.4C with continued development of fossil fuels. So far the planet has warmed by 1.3C over pre-industrial levels.
"We saw that a lot of cities are seeing large changes,” said Filazzola. "Many species are moving in and many species are moving out.”
Among the broad trends identified in the study: Most vertebrates, including loons, canids (which includes coyotes) and amphibians will become less common across the cities studied. So too will the seemingly ubiquitous earthworm, though only one species of earthworm showed up in the data. The prevalence of turtles, scorpions and (in an exception to the vertebrates decline) mice, meanwhile, is broadly expected to increase.
