Why extreme events matter for species redistribution

2025 · doi:10.32942/x2zh0g
preprint OA: closed
Full text JSON View at publisher

Abstract

Climate change is altering species’ distributions globally. Increasing frequency of extreme weather and climate events (EWCEs), including heat waves, droughts, storms, floods, and fires, is one of the hallmarks of climate change. These events can trigger rapid shifts in species’ distributions by impacting dispersal, establishment, and survival of organisms. Despite species redistribution being widely studied in response to longer-term trends of climate change, few studies consider the contribution of EWCEs to range shifts. With EWCEs impacting ecologically, economically, and culturally important species, we call for integrating EWCEs into the study of biodiversity redistribution. Advances in data availability and statistical methods are improving our capacity to understand and integrate these complex processes into adaptive conservation management efforts and biodiversity assessments.
Full text 1,694 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · 2 sections · click to expand

Abstract

Climate change is altering species’ distributions globally. Increasing frequency of extreme weather and climate events (EWCEs) is one of the hallmarks of climate change. Despite species redistribution being widely studied in response to longer-term climate trends, the contribution of EWCEs to range shifts is not well understood. We outline how EWCEs can trigger rapid and unexpected range boundary fluctuations by impacting dispersal, establishment, and survival. Whether these mechanisms cause temporary or persistent range shifts depends on the spatiotemporal context and exposure to EWCEs. Using the increasing availability of data and statistical tools to examine EWCE impacts at fine spatiotemporal scales on species redistribution will be critical for informing conservation management of ecologically, economically, and culturally important species. DOI https://doi.org/10.32942/X2ZH0G Subjects Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Keywords

dispersal, extreme weather and climate events, range contraction, range expansion, range shifts Dates Published: 2025-01-26 10:57 Last Updated: 2025-07-27 13:29 Older Versions License CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Additional Metadata Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: Not applicable Language: English

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

⚙ Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback ⓘ

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2025) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00