Tropical mountains are the most biodiverse regions on earth¹, and tropical montane species are conjectured to be at high risk of extinction from climate change^2,3,4,5. These risks may be particularly acute in tropical montane regions, where species have narrow ranges⁶, and the climate is changing more quickly than in the lowland tropics⁷. To avoid extinction, many tropical species may need to shift their distributions upward along elevational gradients^3,5,8,9,10. Such upward shifts in distribution are a commonly expected response to climate change¹¹, and aggregate vegetation types have begun to shift uphill in some habitats^10,12. However, individual species appear to be migrating less rapidly than expected to keep pace with climate¹³, particularly in tropical regions^14,15. Overall, the concern over tropical extinction risk is amplified by a deficiency of data on species’ distributions and climatic tolerances from these diverse and complex ecosystems.

Experimental evidence of climate change extinction risk in Neotropical montane epiphytes

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Climate change is conjectured to endanger tropical species, particularly in biodiverse montane regions, but accurate estimates of extinction risk are limited by a lack of empirical data demonstrating tropical species’ sensitivity to climate. To fill this gap, studies could match high-quality distribution data with multi-year transplant experiments. Here, we conduct field surveys of epiphyte distributions on three mountains in Central America and perform reciprocal transplant experiments on one mountain across sites that varied in elevation, temperature and aridity. We find that most species are unable to survive outside of their narrow elevational distributions. Additionally, our findings suggest starkly different outcomes from temperature conditions expected by 2100 under different climate change scenarios. Under temperatures associated with low-emission scenarios, most tropical montane epiphyte species will survive, but under emission scenarios that are moderately high, 5-36% of our study species may go extinct and 10-55% of populations may be lost. Using a test of tropical species’ climate tolerances from a large field experiment, paired with detailed species distribution data across multiple mountains, our work strengthens earlier conjecture about risks of wide-spread extinctions from climate change in tropical montane ecosystems.