Camille Parmesan

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · SETE

To achieve sustainable targets, international panels call for a transformative change in human–nature interactions to foster human well‐being and promote pro‐environmental behaviour. The extent to which people considered themselves as part of nature—known as human–nature connectedness—has been shown to be a key societal trait for achieving such a t...

Abstract As plant species expand their upper limits of distribution under current warming, some retain both traditional climate space and biotic environment while others encounter novel conditions. The latter is the case for Rhododendron campanulatum, a woody shrub that grows both above and below treeline at our study site in the Eastern Himalayas...

Despite growing evidence that "connectedness" of humans with nature creates multiple benefits for both humans and nature, these benefits are not fully considered by health and conservation policymakers. Studies are scattered across scientific disciplines including health, education, psychology and biology, making it difficult to get a complete over...

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19, emerged in late 2019, halfway through the preparation of the IPCC WGII Sixth Assessment Report. This Cross-Chapter Box assesses how the massive shock of the pandemic and response measures interact with climate-related impacts and risks as well as its significan...

The Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a comprehensive assessment of the scientific literature relevant to climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The report recognizes the interactions of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societie...

Increases in the frequency and magnitudes of extreme events, attributed to anthropogenic climate change by WGI (IPCC, 2021a), are now causing profound negative effects across all realms of the world (marine, terrestrial, freshwater and polar) (medium confidence) (Fox-Kemper et al., 2021; Seneviratne et al., 2021) (Sections 2.3.1, 2.3.2, 2.3.3.5, 2....

Nature-based solutions provide adaptation and mitigation benefits for climate change as well as contributing to other sustainable development goals (high confidence). Effective nature-based climate change mitigation stems from inclusive decision-making and adaptive management pathways that deliver climate-resilient systems serving multiple sustaina...

Climate change is altering the life cycles of many pathogenic organisms and changing the risk of transmission of vector- and water-borne infectious diseases to humans (high confidence). The rearrangement and emergence of some diseases are already observed in temperate zone and high-elevation areas and coastal areas (medium confidence to high confid...

Insects have been key players in assessments of biodiversity impacts of anthropogenically-driven environmental change, including the evolutionary and ecological impacts of climate change. Populations of Edith's Checkerspot Butterfly (Euphydryas editha) adapt rapidly to diverse environmental conditions, with numerous high-impact studies documenting...

Evolutionary change impacts the rate at which insect pests, pollinators, or disease vectors expand or contract their geographic ranges. Although evolutionary changes, and their ecological feedbacks, strongly affect these risks and associated ecological and economic consequences, they are often underappreciated in management efforts. Greater rigor a...

Studies in birds and trees show climatic stresses distributed across species' ranges, not only at range limits. Here, new analyses from the butterfly Euphydryas editha reveal mechanisms generating these stresses: geographic mosaics of natural selection, acting on tradeoffs between climate adaptation and fitness traits, cause some range-central popu...

Internationally agreed sustainability goals are being missed. Here, we conduct global meta-analyses to assess how the extent to which humans see themselves as part of nature-known as human-nature connectedness (HNC)-can be used as a leverage point to reach sustainability. A meta-analysis of 147 correlational studies shows that individuals with high...

The COVID-19 pandemic and anthropogenic climate change are global crises. We show how strongly these crises are connected, including the underlying societal inequities and problems of poverty, substandard housing, and infrastructure including clean water supplies. The origins of all these crises are related to modern consumptive industrialisation,...

Internationally-agreed sustainability goals are being missed. Here, we document a potential reason for this failure and show how the extent to which humans see themselves as part of nature – known as human-nature connectedness (HNC) – can be used as a leverage point for increasing public engagement towards sustainability targets. We conduct the fir...

Internationally-agreed sustainability goals are being missed. Here, we show how the extent to which humans see themselves as part of nature –known as human-nature connectedness (HNC) –can be used as a leverage point for reaching sustainability. We conduct the first global meta-analysis of the HNC literature. Meta-analysis of 147 correlational studi...

As species' poleward range limits expand under climate change, generalists are expected to be better colonists than specialists, extending their ranges faster. This effect of specialization on range shifts has been shown, but so has the reverse cause‐effect: in a global meta‐analysis of butterfly diets it was range expansions themselves that caused...

This is a reponse to Kharouba and Wolkovich's (2020) review of consumer-resource phenological synchrony. They provide a valuable review and cogent advocacy for future work. However, they misunderstand and misinterpret examples from plant-insect interactions. Their detailed case study involves phenological synchrony/ asynchrony between spring hatchi...

Dynamics of herbivorous insect diet breadth are important in generation of novel pests, biological control of weeds and as indicators of global change impacts. But what forces and events drive these dynamics? Here we present evidence for a novel scenario: that specialization increases in persistent populations, but that, at the species level, this...

Alpine treelines are expected to shift upward due to recent climate change. However, interpretation of changes in montane systems has been problematic because effects of climate change are frequently confounded with those of land use changes. The eastern Himalaya, particularly Langtang National Park, Central Nepal, has been relatively undisturbed f...

We illustrate an evolutionary host shift driven by increased fitness on a novel host, despite maladaptation to it in six separate host‐adaptive traits. Here, local adaptation is defined as possession of traits that provide advantage in specific environmental contexts; thus individuals can have higher fitness in benign environments to which they are...

1. This study provides evidence that a heliophilic butterfly, the Glanville fritillary (Melitaea cinxia) has adapted differently to environmental variation across latitudes and elevations. 2. In cool air, basking M. cinxia orient themselves perpendicular to the sun's rays to gain heat and take off. During flight, solar heating is reduced because or...

The case for endangerment In 2009, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established the so-called “Endangerment Finding.” This defined a suite of six long-lived greenhouse gases as “air pollution.” Such air pollution was anticipated to represent a danger to the health and welfare of current and future generations. Thus, the EPA has the au...

Compared to traditional arable crops, second‐generation perennial energy crops (PECs) are generally associated with increased biodiversity and ecosystem services, but robust experimental studies on this subject are few. Consequently, the potential for PEC cultivation to contribute to enhanced pollination processes in adjacent farmland remains uncle...

Global transport of organisms by humans provides novel resources to wild species, which often respond maladaptively. Native herbivorous insects have been killed feeding on toxic exotic plants, which acted as 'ecological traps'1-4. We document a novel 'eco-evolutionary trap' stemming from the opposite effect; that is, high fitness on an exotic resou...

Climate change challenges conservation planners in making decisions about habitat site selection and augmentation. This pilot study explores the use of Robust Decision Making (RDM), a decision analytic approach employed in water and coastal management, for conservation decision-making. It employs the RDM approach to design a theoretical decision ex...

Studies of heat shock response show a correlation with local climate, although this is more often across altitudinal than latitudinal gradients. In the present study, differences in constitutive but not inducible components of heat shock response are detected among populations of the Glanville fritillary butterfly Melitaea cinxia L. that exist at t...

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has succeeded in shielding hundreds of species from extinction and improving species recovery over time. However, recovery for most species officially protected by the ESA - i.e., listed species-has been harder to achieve than initially envisioned. Threats to species are persistent and pervasive, funding has been in...

Climate change is shifting species' distribution and phenology. Ecological traits, such as mobility or reproductive mode, explain variation in observed rates of shift for some taxa. However, estimates of relationships between traits and climate responses could be influenced by how responses are measured. We compiled a global dataset of 651 publishe...

Background: Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) will influence all aspects of plant biology over coming decades. Many changes in wild species have already been well-documented as a result of increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations, warming climate and changing precipitation regimes. A wealth of available data has allowed the use of meta-analyses t...

Modeling the distributions of species, especially of invasive species in non-native ranges, involves multiple challenges. Here, we developed some novel approaches to species distribution modeling aimed at reducing the influences of such challenges and improving the realism of projections. We estimated species–environment relationships for Partheniu...

The butterfly Euphydryas editha is known to be vulnerable to climate events that exacerbate natural phenological asynchrony between insect and hosts. In prior work, populations of E. editha have been more persistent at high latitudes and high elevations than in the south and at low elevations, consistent with response to observed warming climate. H...

The climate‐sensitive butterfly Euphydryas editha exhibited interpopulation variation in both phenology and egg placement, exposing individuals to diverse thermal environments. We measured ‘eggspace’ temperatures adjacent to natural egg clutches in populations distributed across a range of latitudes (36°8′–44°6′) and altitudes (213–3171 m). Eggs la...

Aim To assess confidence in conclusions about climate‐driven biological change through time, and identify approaches for strengthening confidence scientific conclusions about ecological impacts of climate change. Location Global. Methods We outlined a framework for strengthening confidence in inferences drawn from biological climate impact studie...

Background/Question/Methods Invasive species are commonly cited as one of the top threats to global biodiversity. The IUCN Red List database indicated that invasives are contributing threats 292 extinct, extinct in the wild, critically endangered or endangered fishes. The aquarium trade is one of five main pathways by which aquatic species are int...

Background/Question/Methods: Alpine treelines are responding to current climate change worldwide. However, the global drivers interact with local drivers to elicit a response that is both site and species specific. To understand tree line dynamics and its potential drivers, we studied two most dominant tree species, Abies spectabilis (AS) and Rhodo...

Background/Question/Methods Endangered species face an uncertain future due to a variety of anthropogenic threats, including the impacts of climate change. Despite this current and emerging threat, there are a variety of proactive conservation strategies that can be taken to reduce its impact on endangered species. Fundamentally, there is a need to...

My research focuses on the current impacts of climate change on wildlife, from field-based work on butterflies to synthetic analyses of global impacts on a broad range of species across terrestrial and marine biomes. I work actively with governmental agencies and NGOs to help develop conservation assessment and planning tools aimed at preserving bi...

The reorganization of patterns of species diversity driven by anthropogenic climate change, and the consequences for humans, are not yet fully understood or appreciated. Nevertheless, changes in climate conditions are useful for predicting shifts in species distributions at global and local scales. Here we use the velocity of climate change to deri...

We assess climate impacts of global warming using ongoing observations and paleoclimate data. We use Earth's measured energy imbalance, paleoclimate data, and simple representations of the global carbon cycle and temperature to define emission reductions needed to stabilize climate and avoid potentially disastrous impacts on today's young people, f...

We assess climate impacts of global warming using ongoing observations and paleoclimate data. We use Earth’s measured energy imbalance, paleoclimate data, and simple representations of the global carbon cycle and temperature to define emission reductions needed to stabilize climate and avoid potentially disastrous impacts on today’s young people, f...

Ecotypic variation among populations may become associated with widespread genomic differentiation, but theory predicts that this should happen only under particular conditions of gene flow, selection and population size. In closely related species, we might expect the strength of host-associated genomic differentiation (HAD) to be correlated with...

Background/Question/Methods In the past 10 years, several global meta-analyses have shown that about half of species studied have changed their distributions in response to regional climate change. However, the brunt of data were from terrestrial systems, with too little marine data to make a formal comparison. Working with the NCEAS Marine Clima...

Background/Question/Methods Parthenium weed (Parthenium hysterophorus L., Asteraceae), a native of tropical America, is a weed of global significance. It was first identified outside its native range in Australia in 1955 and then India in 1956. Since the 1950s, the plant has spread to many tropical and sub-tropical areas (three dozen countries) o...

The unrelenting pace of anthropogenic climate change necessitates a radical shift in conservation goals. Many polar and mountaintop species have already contracted their ranges in response to recent climate change. For species already endangered, focus on historically-occupied habitats may ensure the species’ extinction as global warming shifts the...

There is increasing pressure from policymakers for ecologists to generate more detailed ‘attribution’ analyses aimed at quantitatively estimating relative contributions of different driving forces, including anthropogenic climate change (ACC), to observed biological changes. Here, we argue that this approach is not productive for ecological studies...

A century of long-term observations and detailed experiments reveals the disproportionate impact of severe weather events and extreme climatic periods on the ecology and general health of wild species. There is evidence that anthropogenic climate change has already altered the frequency and severity of certain extreme events. Although analyses of b...

Disparate ecological datasets are often organized into databases post hoc and then analyzed and interpreted in ways that may diverge from the purposes of the original data collections. Few studies, however, have attempted to quantify how biases inherent in these data (for example, species richness, replication, climate) affect their suitability for...

Background/Question/Methods Invasive species are among the top three greatest threats to global biodiversity, and competition, and while not often cited as the ultimate cause of native population extirpation by invasive species, competition is a major contributor to native population declines. Cuatro Cinegas, in Coahuila, Mexico is an oasis in th...

Background/Question/Methods Invasive species are among the top three greatest threats to global biodiversity, yet our understanding of the characteristics that make a species a good invader or a habitat more susceptible to invasion is limited. Understanding these mechanisms can aid in predicting areas with a high invasion risk. Cuatro Cinegas, in...

A Marine Climate Impacts Workshop was held from 29 April to 3 May 2012 at the US National Center of Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara. This workshop was the culmination of a series of six meetings over the past three years, which had brought together 25 experts in climate change ecology, analysis of large datasets, palaeontology, m...

Warming experiments are increasingly relied on to estimate plant responses to global climate change. For experiments to provide meaningful predictions of future responses, they should reflect the empirical record of responses to temperature variability and recent warming, including advances in the timing of flowering and leafing. We compared phenol...

Analyses of datasets throughout the temperate midlatitude regions show a widespread tendency for species to advance their springtime phenology, consistent with warming trends over the past 20-50 y. Within these general trends toward earlier spring, however, are species that either have insignificant trends or have delayed their timing. Various expl...

Hulme points out that observed rates of range expansion by invasive alien species are higher than the median speed of isotherm movement over the past 50 years, which in turn has outpaced the rates of climate-associated range changes of marine and terrestrial species ([ 1 ][1], [ 2 ][2]). This is not

Within general trends toward earlier spring, observed cases of species and ecosystems that have not advanced their phenology, or have even delayed it, appear paradoxical, especially when made in temperate regions experiencing significant warming. The typical interpretation of this pattern has been that non-responders are insensitive to relatively s...

Climate change challenges organisms to adapt or move to track changes in environments in space and time. We used two measures of thermal shifts from analyses of global temperatures over the past 50 years to describe the pace of climate change that species should track: the velocity of climate change (geographic shifts of isotherms over time) and th...

Global warming due to human-made gases, mainly CO2, is already 0.8{\deg}C and deleterious climate impacts are growing worldwide. More warming is 'in the pipeline' because Earth is out of energy balance, with absorbed solar energy exceeding planetary heat radiation. Maintaining a climate that resembles the Holocene, the world of stable shorelines in...

Background/Question/Methods Invasive species are among the top three greatest threats to global biodiversity, yet our understanding of the characteristics that make a species a good invader or a habitat more susceptible to invasion is limited. Understanding these mechanisms can aid in predicting areas with a high invasion risk. Cuatro Cienegas, in...

The biological world is responding rapidly to a changing climate, but attempts to attribute individual impacts to rising greenhouse gases are ill-advised.

Global warming due to human-made gases, mainly CO2, is already 0.8{\deg}C and deleterious climate impacts are growing worldwide. More warming is 'in the pipeline' because Earth is out of energy balance, with absorbed solar energy exceeding planetary heat radiation. Maintaining a climate that resembles the Holocene, the world of stable shorelines in...

Changing climate can disrupt existing phenological relations between interacting species. We might expect the historical baseline for these effects to be precise synchrony between the season at which a consumer most requires food and the time when its resources are most available. When this is the case, change in any direction would be detrimental...

Climate change alters phenological relations between interacting species. We might expect the historical baseline, or starting-point, for such effects to be precise synchrony between the season at which a consumer most requires food and the time when its resources are most available. We synthesize evidence that synchrony was not the historical cond...

Background/Question/Methods Several assessments have predicted that species restricted to extreme environments, such as mountaintops, the Arctic and Antarctic, would be most sensitive to small levels of warming. Indeed, these areas are showing the first signs of species declines and extinctions. New meta-analyses indicate large differences in mag...

Background/Question/Methods Changing climate can disrupt existing phenological relations between interacting species. We might expect the historical baseline for these effects to be precise synchrony between the season at which a consumer most requires food and the time when its resources are most available. When this is the case, change in any d...

Sample sizes and locations of the populations used for polymorphism screening. (0.10 MB DOC)

This file lists all the primers tested in the study, and the results of polymorphism testing based on a small sample of 8 individuals. Loci used for further analysis are highlighted in gray. (0.12 MB DOC)

The isolation of microsatellite markers remains laborious and expensive. For some taxa, such as Lepidoptera, development of microsatellite markers has been particularly difficult, as many markers appear to be located in repetitive DNA and have nearly identical flanking regions. We attempted to circumvent this problem by bioinformatic mining of micr...

Background/Question/Methods Invasive exotic species can be detrimental to native populations due to effects from predators and diseases with which the native populations have not co-evolved and the introduction of new competitors which may lead to reduced numbers, or to competitive exclusion. These effects can be stronger on islands, and island sy...

Biodiversity Change and Human Health brings together leading experts from the natural science and social science realms as well as the medical community to explore the explicit linkages between human-driven alterations of biodiversity and documented impacts of those changes on human health. The book utilizes multidisciplinary approaches to explore...

Moving species outside their historic ranges may mitigate loss of biodiversity in the face of global climate change.