AS GLOBAL warming bites, animals and plants will go extinct ever faster, according to a computer model which predicts how species’ ranges will shift in response to climate change.
Stephen Williams at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and colleagues combined information on the whereabouts of 65 different species with data from around 200 weather stations in a mountainous region of Queensland. This let them identify the preferred local climate of each species and predict how rising temperatures will force them to move.
After a 1 °C hike the model predicts one species will go extinct. But a temperature increase…
