Contemporary Climate Change Impacts on Mexican Fauna

Abstract

Climate change is a major force acting upon biodiversity and on the planetary dynamics as a whole. Consequently, in recent years, growing human and material resources worldwide have been devoted to understanding the course of current climate change and its consequences on different dimensions. In Mexico, the biodiversity scientific community has been increasingly active in this field, mostly modeling future impacts of climate change on biodiversity but neglecting current evidence-oriented research to document the actual impacts. Here, we review how the climate has changed in Mexico in the last decades and explore prospective tendencies. Then, we revised the development of climate change biology research in Mexico to summarize the known impacts on its faunal component and future expectations. Finally, we identified significant knowledge gaps and proposed future research directions and general recommendations for biodiversity conservation in the face of climate change.