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Redistributing Life: How Climate Change Is Redrawing the Map of Species Migration On our warming planet, wildlife is on the move. Its redistribution is wide, complex and hard to predict since not every species responds to the same cues, or shifts at the same speed. To protect biodiversity, conservation approaches must shift as well, matching the pace of change. — As the climate shifts, animals face a crisis of spatial survival: the landscapes they once called home are becoming unrecognizable or unreachable. Species’ ranges are already shifting towards the poles, but also to higher altitudes and cooler latitudes to track more favorable life conditions. The timing of migrations – the cyclical journeys species embark on to breed or find peak resources – also risks falling out of sync with seasonal triggers like day length and snowmelt. Climate change is already forcing some species to move, disrupting the ecosystem services they provide to people and ecosystems around the world, but migratory and moving patterns are less clear-cut than we might assume. A 2023 study showed that less than half of the documented range shifts follow predictable patterns in direction or speed, a conclusion reached in another assessment on migratory species from the same year. While some of the available data shows significant gaps... https://earth.org/redistributing-life-how-climate-change-is-redrawing-the-map-of-species-migration/