Researchers confirm scale matters in determining vulnerability of freshwater fish to climate changes

by Felicia Spencer, Virginia Tech
May 16, 2024

The silver chub isn’t considered sensitive to climate change on a national scale, but context matters. For example, if climate change sensitivity is evaluated in only one region of the United States, the freshwater fish appears quite a bit more susceptible.

“Relative to other species we looked at in the gulf region of the U.S., the silver chub occupied a pretty small geographic area,” said Samuel Silknetter, a Ph.D. student in biological sciences. “If we didn’t look at the climate sensitivity across multiple spatial scales, a regional analysis alone may miss the bigger context of why a species appears sensitive to climate change at some scales but not others, especially compared to other species.”

Silknetter and Associate Professor Meryl Mims recently led a team that explored the influence the spatial extent of research – the geographical coverage of data collected – has on evaluating the sensitivity of different fish species to climate change. The findings were published in Ecosphere.

Keep reading: https://news.vt.edu/articles/2024/05/meryl-mims-samuel-silknetter-rcs-index-climate-sensitivity-freshwater-fish-flsi.html

Read the Ecosphere paper: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2.4779