Résumé
Climate change is a major threat to global biodiversity that will produce
a range of new selection pressures. Understanding species responses to
climate change requires an interdisciplinary perspective, combining
ecological, molecular and environmental approaches. We propose an applied
integrated framework to identify populations under threat from climate
change based on their extent of exposure, inherent sensitivity due to
adaptive and neutral genetic variation and range shift potential. We
consider intraspecific vulnerability and population-level responses, an
important but often neglected conservation research priority. We
demonstrate how this framework can be applied to vertebrates with limited
dispersal abilities using empirical data for the bat Plecotus austriacus.
We use ecological niche modelling and environmental dissimilarity analysis
to locate areas at high risk of exposure to future changes. Combining
outlier tests with genotype-environment association analysis we identify
potential climate-adaptive SNPs in our genomic dataset and differences in
the frequency of adaptive and neutral variation between populations. We
assess landscape connectivity and show that changing environmental
suitability may limit the future movement of individuals, thus affecting
both the ability of populations to shift their distribution to
climatically suitable areas and the probability of evolutionary rescue
through the spread of adaptive genetic variation among populations.
Therefore a better understanding of movement ecology and landscape
connectivity is needed for predicting population persistence under climate
change. Our study highlights the importance of incorporating genomic data
to determine sensitivity, adaptive potential and range shift potential,
instead of relying solely on exposure to guide species vulnerability
assessments and conservation planning.