Animals 'on the run' from climate change

Plants and animals will need to move at an average rate of a quarter of a mile a year to escape climate change over the course of this century, according to scientists.

The Telegraph (U.K.), Dec. 23, 2009

For species in flatter, low-lying regions such as deserts, grasslands, and coastal areas, the pace of the retreat could exceed more than half a mile a year, it is claimed.

Creatures and plants only able to tolerate a narrow range of temperatures will be most vulnerable, said the researchers.

Those unable to match the migration speeds needed to escape the effects of global warming could vanish into extinction.

Plants in almost a third of the habitats studied were thought to fall into this category, the scientists reported in the journal Nature.

Fragmentation by human development made the situation more perilous in some areas as it left many species with "nowhere to go".

The researchers combined data on climate and temperature variation worldwide with projections to calculate the "temperature velocity" for different habitats. This is a measure of how fast temperature zones are moving across the landscape as the planet warms - and how quickly plants and animals will need to migrate to keep up.

The expected temperature velocity for the whole of the 21st century was 0.26 miles per year.

Author Dr Chris Field, director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, California, said animals will be forced to migrate while many plants will die out.