Mountains in a warming world: biotic refugia or elevators to extinction?

While no palaeoclimate is a perfect equivalent for future climate scenarios, the geobiological record is our only observational precedent for how ecosystems may respond in a rapidly changing world.

Historically, montane ecosystems served as refugia for species under Pleistocene glaciations, but a major knowledge gap currently exists as to whether they can do the same in a warming world, or if these systems are already reaching maximum tolerance. How then can we improve predictions of climate-induced range shifts?

To bridge the knowledge gap between ancient and current global changes, palaeoecological datasets that inform climate projections are required.A growing body of research demonstrates that UV-B absorbing compounds contained in fossil pollen act as a reliable, independent proxy for changes in UV-B radiation.

As UV-B increases with elevation, it is now possible to reconstruct how ancient plants shifted up- or downslope in response to climate change.

In this four-year project, I will develop a cutting-edge palaeoelevation proxy that integrates ecology and photobiology with biogeochemical signatures from a one-million-year record on the Tibetan Plateau.

New UV-B calibration models will be fitted to fossil taxa via an integrated vibrational spectroscopic approach to be made open-access.

This creates the opportunity to use existing palaeo-datasets for directly testing how mountains sheltered biodiversity during past climate changes — and how they may do so in the future.