Are Mediterranean marine threatened species at high risk by climate change?

Rapid anthropogenic climate change is driving threatened biodiversity one step closer to extinction. Effects on native biodiversity are determined by an interplay between species’ exposure to climate change and their specific ecological and life-history characteristics that render them even more susceptible. Impacts on biodiversity have already been reported; however, a systematic risk evaluation of threatened marine populations is lacking. Here, we employ a trait-based approach to assess the risk of 90 threatened marine Mediterranean species to climate change, combining species’ exposure to increased sea temperature and intrinsic vulnerability. One-quarter of the threatened marine biodiversity of the Mediterranean Sea is predicted to be under elevated levels of climate risk, with various traits identified as key vulnerability traits. Climate risk, vulnerability and exposure hotspots are distributed along the Western Mediterranean, Alboran, Aegean, and Adriatic Seas. At each Mediterrane..., Data for the estimation of vulnerability ranks and exposure indices were collected from several free electronic databases cited in the article. They were processed in Microsoft Excel, in R studio and ArcGIS. ,