What sets the pace at which species ranges track climate change?

As the climate warms, many species are moving towards the poles and up mountains, but some race ahead, some lag far behind and some move the "wrong" way. Knowing what sets the pace would show which species will keep up.

Question

What determines the rate at which species distributions respond to climate change? Which species traits (dispersal, generation time, thermal tolerance), environmental factors (fragmentation, land use, topography, the speed of local climate change) and biotic interactions explain why observed range shifts vary so widely?

Background

It is one of 100 fundamental ecological questions drawn up for the British Ecological Society's centenary from 754 questions submitted by 388 participants. In the theme on human impacts and global change it pairs with the question of what determines whether species adapt, shift their ranges or go extinct [1].

What is known

• A meta-analysis found species shifting to higher elevations at a median 11.0 m per decade and to higher latitudes at 16.9 km per decade, with larger shifts where warming was greater but great variation among species [2].
• The BioShifts database of 30,534 range shifts shows marine species tracking shifting isotherms more closely and moving poleward six times faster than terrestrial species; on land, human activities impede tracking, and elevational shifts lag well behind isotherms [3].
• A systematic review found only 46.6% of range-shift observations heading towards higher latitudes, elevations or depths, though average rates were significant for latitude (11.8 km per decade) and elevation (9 m per decade); study methods strongly affected the results [4].
• In the European Alps, 60% of 135 plant species showed an extinction debt and 38% a colonisation credit, so the distributions of very few species fully track climate change [5].

What would count as progress

No single result settles a question like this; contributions like these would move it forward:

• Analyses of range-shift databases such as BioShifts that test which traits and landscape factors predict lags, controlling for study methods, with predictions checked on species held out of the fit.
• Repeated, standardised resurveys of historical plots and transects, released openly, so that shifts are measured with comparable methods.
• Process-based models of dispersal and establishment that reproduce observed lags for well-studied groups before they are used for forecasts.

References

1. Sutherland, W. J. et al. (2013). Identification of 100 fundamental ecological questions. Journal of Ecology 101(1), 58–67.
2. Chen, I.-C., Hill, J. K., Ohlemüller, R., Roy, D. B. & Thomas, C. D. (2011). Rapid range shifts of species associated with high levels of climate warming. Science 333(6045), 1024–1026.
3. Lenoir, J. et al. (2020). Species better track climate warming in the oceans than on land. Nature Ecology & Evolution 4(8), 1044–1059.
4. Rubenstein, M. A. et al. (2023). Climate change and the global redistribution of biodiversity: substantial variation in empirical support for expected range shifts. Environmental Evidence 12, 7.
5. Rumpf, S. B. et al. (2019). Extinction debts and colonization credits of non-forest plants in the European Alps. Nature Communications 10, 4293.

Source

Imported from Identification of 100 fundamental ecological questions, question 83, curated by Sutherland et al. Listed as open in the source (2013) and still an active research question as of 2026-10-20. The statement above is written in our own words; see the source for the original wording, history and discussion.