Climatic microrefugia under anthropogenic climate change: implications for species redistribution

Jonathan Roger Michel Henri Lenoir (1) , Tarek Hattab (1) , Guillaume Pierre (2, 3)

1 EDYSAN - Ecologie et Dynamique des Systèmes Anthropisés - UMR CNRS 7058
2 GEGENAA - Groupe d'Étude sur les Géomatériaux et Environnements Naturels, Anthropiques et Archéologiques - EA 3795
3 URCA - Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne

Svenning 2015, Bertrand et al. 2016). For instance, living organisms may find long-term enclaves/shelters, where specific and relatively stable climatic conditions are buffered and thus decoupled from regional climate change, to persist locally as climate relicts (Hampe and Jump 2011). Such peculiar microclimates that support isolated populations of organisms over long time periods (several generations) outside their main distribution area refer to climatic microrefugia (sensu Rull 2009, Dobrowski 2011, Hannah et al. 2014, Hylander et al. 2015) and are thus particularly relevant to explain disequilibrium dynamics under climate change. Microrefugia (plural) and microrefugium (singular) are terms initially coined by paleoecologists (Leal 2001, Rull 2009) to designate one or several small area(s) sheltered from broader-scale environmental instabilities over time, in which small populations of organisms can survive outside their main distribution area (i.e. the macrorefugium). Famous examples are the remote or distal microrefugia (Rull 2009, 2010)-also known as cryptic refugia when specifically referring to the contraction phase of a species' expansion-contraction cycle (Stewart and Lister 2001, Stewart et al. 2010)-located close to the Scandinavian ice sheet and very far from macrorefugium located in southern

Domaines: Géomorphologie

Jonathan Roger Michel Henri Lenoir, Tarek Hattab, Guillaume Pierre. Climatic microrefugia under anthropogenic climate change: implications for species redistribution. Ecography, 2016, 40, pp.253 - 266. ⟨10.1111/ecog.02788⟩. ⟨hal-03276591⟩