Ricerc@Sapienza

Phylogenetic turnover quantifies the evolutionary distance among species assemblages and is central to understanding the main drivers shaping biodiversity. It is affected both by geographic and environmental distance between sites. Therefore, analyzing phylogenetic turnover in environmental space requires removing the effect of geographic distance. Here, we apply a novel approach by deciphering phylogenetic turnover of European tetrapods in environmental space after removing geographic land distance effects.

Although it is widely accepted that future climatic change-if unabated-is likely to have major impacts on biodiversity(1,2), few studies have attempted to quantify the number of species whose populations have already been impacted by climate change(3,4). Using a systematic review of published literature, we identified mammals and birds for which there is evidence that they have already been impacted by climate change.