Temperate local extinctions from climate change are outpacing tropical extinctions (opens in new tab)

Climate change may soon cause a catastrophic loss of global biodiversity. For decades, tropical species have widely been considered more vulnerable than temperate species. However, some studies have suggested the opposite. Using a global-scale dataset from resurvey studies spanning 5,151 plant and animal species encompassing 39,157 sites, we show that climate-related local extinctions were significantly more frequent among temperate (49% of surveyed species) than tropical species (33%). We th...