India, Nov. 2 -- Conservation traditionally focused on protecting species where they are. As species redistribution has become increasingly unpredictable, how should strategies evolve?

Such shifts are difficult to predict, since they depend on many factors and biotic interactions. But we already observe such redistributions on very short timescales (less than 10 years for research on lizards). Healthy forests might be the best and only option for insects to avoid heat mortality unless the temperature increase can be significantly reduced. Along elevational gradients, such as investigated in our study, animals could have the opportunity to migrate from hot lowland areas into cooler habitats at higher elevations. For this, it would be esse...