Climate change causes "heat stress" European birds and butterflies

The areas of distribution of European butterflies and birds moving north following climate change, a "journey" which is not fast enough and that prevents these species can be placed in areas that are most appropriate to them so living in a thermal stress constant.

This phenomenon, known as "climate debt" can represent a problem for the conservation of biodiversity in Europe, according to the authors of an international - collaboration of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) with research and published in the journal Nature - which also shows that butterflies and birds moving northward at rates different.

Birds are 212 kilometers away from its optimum climatic areas while the butterflies are approximately 135.

For this reason, many species which previously coexisted in the same space now because they disagree on what European ecosystems are changing "speed" u000a"unseen", drawn from the Centre of ecological research and forestry applications (CREAF) University Barcelona.

Many birds which feed on caterpillars of butterflies would have no food, and in general, this could affect a lower availability of resources for another number of species.

The work demonstrates that over the past two decades, the distribution of birds and butterflies within the European communities has been responding form descompasada to global warming, a climate debt that threatens the species.

The study is part of the MONTES Consolider project leads the CREAF and in the European project SCALA which coordinates the German Centre UFZ.

The results of the study show that, between 1990 and 2008, the European average temperature moved northward 249 km.

To stay in similar climatic conditions, the species should have been moved u000athe same miles for the same period of time.

However, this study reveals that, on average, communities of birds in Europe moved northward just 37 kilometers, while the butterflies would have done so only 114 km, to accumulate a gap.

The "climate debt" and heat stress make both birds and butterflies are increasingly vulnerable to potential threats, points out Dr. Constanti Stefanescu Museum of Granollers of natural sciences, which has been involved in the investigation.

For carrying out this study researchers have calculated the average temperature in living each species and, from this specific value and the data of the traces of birds and butterflies, the temperature associated with each community (CTI).

Analyzing the value of the CTI for more than 10,000 areas of biodiversity sampling, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean basin, it has been observed that this u000aindex has increased between 1990-2008 by a magnitude of displacement surprising northward.

This is explained not only by the arrival of new species, but also by changes in the abundance of populations, according to data from Finland, Sweden, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Czech Republic, France and Spain.

The increase of the CTI during the study period is evident in most of European countries, but the displacement towards the North is far more prominent in the Scandinavian, where the effects of climate change would be more pronounced than in the Mediterranean.

The study has been possible thanks to data collected by thousands of fans to birds and butterflies, on a voluntary basis, they have participated in the traces of these agencies in a total of seven countries Europeans.

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