Our weekly lunch seminar series featuring internal speakers in the field of ecology and evolutionary biology. This seminar will be in-person and livestreaming on Zoom.

Abstract:
Ecological communities have been shifting rapidly under recent climate change with alarming consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem services, yet the generality and causality of such shifts have to be demonstrated. We focus on grasslands in the California Floristic Province, a global biodiversity hotspot spanning 300,000 km2, where considerable climate warming and drying have occurred. We compiled long-term grassland community composition data from 12 observational sites and a warming experiment, estimated hundreds of species’ climate niches from millions of occurrence records, and analyzed changes in community composition and species gain and loss in reference to their climate distributions. We show that these grassland communities experienced significant shifts toward species tolerant of warmer and drier conditions, at a pace similar to climate warming and drying. The consistent observational and experimental evidence establish grassland community shift as a predictable fingerprint of climate change.