Hide and seek in a warming climate How are different animal
species adapting to a warmer future? Much of the world’s
biodiversity faces an uncertain future as global warming
continues across the Earth’s surface. The scale and pace of the
threat posed by a warming climate has alarmed many scientists,
leading them to search for areas that may be least affected by
having unusual or stable climates. Scientists reason that such
areas could provide somewhere for species to expand and contract
their populations over long periods or offer shelter from more
extreme conditions. They have been termed ‘microrefugia’ but are
also known as ‘cryptic refugia’ because of the difficulty in
observing them within a landscape. Before we can identify
refugia, we first need to define them in an ecologically
meaningful way. Scientists have known for years that refugia
exist as patches in variable (heterogeneous) landscapes, but
until recently our definitions of microrefugia have lacked
precision or were poorly characterised. To addr