As the climate changes, plants are already shifting their ranges to track suitable temperatures and rainfall. Many conservation strategies assume that helping species move through connected landscapes will reduce extinction risk, but it’s unclear whether these movements can keep pace with the speed of climate change. Global biodiversity forecasts have often relied on unrealistic assumptions that species either cannot move at all or can disperse without limits, making it difficult to identify the most effective conservation actions.
Understanding the balance between habitat change and species movement is increasingly important for conservation planning. If extinction is primarily caused by barriers that prevent plants from reaching new habitats, then improving connectivity may provide a solution. If suitable habitat simply disappears, however, protecting movement corridors alone may not be enough.
Wang, J., Oliveira, B.F., Moore, F.C., Kozar, D.J., Fu, Y. and Dong, X., 2026. Climate-induced range shifts support local plant diversity but don’t reduce extinction risk. Science 392(6798): 648-654. DOI: 10.1126/science.aea1676
To answer this question, researchers combined the world’s largest database of observed plant range shifts with more than 6.8 million plant occurrence records and climate projections for over 67,000 vascular plant species, representing about 18% of global flora. Rather than assuming identical dispersal abilities, the team estimated species-specific rates of movement that account for biological traits, landscape barriers, and environmental conditions. They then projected where suitable habitat will exist by the end of the century under four greenhouse gas emissions scenarios and evaluated which species are likely to reach those locations.
The results show that 7-16% of modeled plant species are projected to lose more than 90% of their ranges by 2100, placing them at high risk of extinction. Surprisingly, 70-80% of those losses are caused by climate-driven disappearance of suitable habitat rather than an inability to disperse. Even allowing plants to move freely produced nearly identical extinction estimates, suggesting that habitat loss, not limited movement, is the dominant threat.
Although range shifts do little to reduce global extinctions, they substantially reshape local biodiversity. Plant movements are projected to increase local species richness across 28% of Earth’s land surface and maintain average richness throughout much of the tropics and subtropics.
In contrast, northern regions above 50°N are expected to experience widespread local declines because warming is occurring faster than most plants can track, creating large dispersal gaps and local extirpations. Mid-latitude regions are likely to see especially high species turnover as new arrivals replace disappearing species and novel ecological communities emerge.
In terms of managing connectivity, the findings suggest a nuanced strategy. Connected landscapes remain essential for helping plants maintain local diversity, particularly in rapidly warming boreal regions where dispersal limitations are strongest. However, connectivity alone cannot prevent many climate-driven extinctions. Protecting climate refugia, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, restoring suitable habitat, and expanding seed banks and other ex situ conservation efforts will be equally important for sustaining plant diversity in a changing world. Together, these approaches can support both the movement of species across connected landscapes and the long-term persistence of the ecosystems they sustain.
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