Download pdf
Global Warming and Island Ecosystems: Evolutionary Adaptations in Heat Resistance
- 1 School of Biological Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85281
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Global warming has significantly altered ecosystems, especially in isolated islands and nearby coastal biomes, where organisms face increased thermal stress and climatic disturbances. These distinctive ecological systems serve as natural laboratories for examining the evolutionary responses of organisms to increased temperatures. This research undertakes a comparative analysis of paleontological evidence and extant species within island ecosystems to elucidate genomic divergences and their evolutionary trajectories, further elucidating the mechanisms underlying thermotolerance adaptation. This study rigorously investigates the roles of natural selection and adaptive mechanisms in enhancing thermotolerance among organisms by integrating palaeobiological datasets and molecular genomic analyses. The review consolidates findings in three primary areas: reconstructing paleoclimatic thermal environments from fossil records, elucidating the physiological and molecular mechanisms of thermotolerance in extant taxa, and assessing climate change as a selective pressure in adaptive evolution. This study consolidates evidence from various perspectives to elucidate the impacts of global warming on evolutionary trajectories and underscores the substantial ecological ramifications of climate-induced selective pressures.
Keywords
Thermotolerance, Adaptive Evolution, Island Ecosystems, Global Warming
[1]. Osland, M. J., Enwright, N. M., Day, R. H., & Doyle, T. W. (2016). Beyond just sea-level rise: Considering macroclimatic drivers within coastal wetland vulnerability assessments to climate change. Global Change Biology, 22(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13084.
[2]. Jevrejeva, S., Jackson, L. P., Grinsted, A., Lincke, D., & Marzeion, B. (2016). Coastal sea level rise with warming above 2°C. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(47), 13342–13347. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1605312113.
[3]. Vousdoukas, M. I., Mentaschi, L., Voukouvalas, E., Verlaan, M., & Feyen, L. (2018). Global probabilistic projections of extreme sea levels show intensification of coastal flood hazard. Nature Communications, 9(1), 2360. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04692-w.
[4]. Davis, L. G., & Madsen, D. B. (2020). The coastal migration theory: Formulation and testable hypotheses. Quaternary Science Reviews, 249, 106605. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2020.106605.
[5]. Braje, T. J., Erlandson, J. M., Rick, T. C., Davis, L., Dillehay, T., Fedje, D. W., ... & Waters, M. R. (2020). Fladmark+ 40: What have we learned about a potential Pacific Coast peopling of the Americas?. American Antiquity, 85(1), 1–21.
[6]. Rantanen, M., Karpechko, A. Y., Lipponen, A., Nordling, K., Hyvärinen, O., Ruosteenoja, K., & Laaksonen, A. (2022). The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979. Communications Earth & Environment, 3(1), 168. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00498-3.
[7]. Treu, S., Marcos, M., Pinto, J., & Jordà, G. (2024). Reconstruction of hourly coastal water levels and counterfactuals without sea level rise for impact attribution. Earth System Science Data, 16(2), 1121–1136. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-1121-2024.
[8]. Rong, X. (2022). Super floods are coming to California: How far are we from the 'doomsday'? The New York Times, pp. 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1038/superflood.
[9]. Jiang, D., Hu, A., & Xu, Y. (2016). Timing and associated climate change of a 2°C global warming. International Journal of Climatology, 36(14), 4512–4522. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.4647.
[10]. Climate Change Widespread, Rapid, and Intensifying. IPCC, 9 Aug. 2021, www.ipcc.ch/2021/08/09/ar6-wg1-20210809-pr/.
Cite this article
Li,C. (2025). Global Warming and Island Ecosystems: Evolutionary Adaptations in Heat Resistance. Theoretical and Natural Science,94,1-7.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
Disclaimer/Publisher's Note
The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.
About volume
Volume title: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Environmental Geoscience and Earth Ecology
© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who
publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this
series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published
version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial
publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and
during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See
Open access policy for details).