Global Climate Change Impacts on Pacific Islands Terrestrial Biodiversity

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with limited geographic distribution at a variety of scales. Island species may be limited in their ability to cope with climate change due to a range of characteristics, including smaller geographic ranges, limited genetic variation, small colonizing populations, reduced species richness, and poor adaptations to avoid predation. The smaller land area of islands provides a smaller realized niche space, which generally translates into very small ranges for island species and especially for endemics. As a result, harmful effects from climate change can encompass an island species' entire habitat more readily than a continental species' habitat. Failure to adjust or adapt can lead to the most extreme outcome of climate change, species extinction. The species' characteristics thus identified were grouped into two categories: one that would make a species vulnerable to the direct impacts of climate change, and one that increases a species' vulnerability to climate change indirectly, ...

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