Talk:Effects of climate change on terrestrial animals

Possible content to add to this article
I am moving this from effects of climate change. It was recently added there but doesn't fit. Also the refs are rather old. It might be useful for this article so I am putting it here for now: "Research shows that the growing season is getting longer each year throughout Europe. Bird populations in London, such as the Grey Heron, have increased due to better water quality and more temperate winters. Migratory patterns of birds and insects in London such as the swallow and orange tip butterfly have been noticed earlier as well due to an increase in spring temperature. In water, wetland organisms sensitive to changes in river flow as a result of climate change have also changed migratory patterns southeast or northeast of England. In Florida, the lower keys marsh rabbit is endangered due to rising sea levels. This species is native to Florida's marshes however, rising sea levels have caused the rabbits to relocate inwards where urbanization has taken over. Due to the effects of rising sea level and urbanization, there is very little habitat remaining for the marsh rabbit to thrive. Similarly, the snowy plover exclusively reproduces in sand dunes yet, rising sea levels disrupts the natural breeding spot for this bird. Without having an adequate area to breed, the snowy plover also remains as one of Florida's threatened species. EMsmile (talk) 11:39, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Please update with info on effects on insects
The article already mentions insects/arthropods at several places, but the info is a bit sparse, (a) new section(s) may be useful, and various key info from the ref below should probably get added. Featured the study in 2022 in science like so:

Scientists warn about summarized effects of climate change on insects, among other novel stressors, which may "drastically reduce our ability to build a sustainable future based on healthy, functional ecosystems", providing several recommended mitigation options.

In addition, a new article Effects of climate change on insects would be good, Climate change and insects may be a better fitting title as it's not just about effects on insects but also on mitigation options and how these effects eventually impact humans. Content from that article could be transcluded to here (for example its summarizing lead and a section-intro).

However, this article gets only very few reads and maybe it should have (a) separate section(s) on the impacts on humans from the various described effects of climate change on terrestrial animals.

Do you think there should be a comprehensive list of scientists' warnings where this should be added? For example at World Scientists' Warning to Humanity. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:54, 8 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Hi User:Prototyperspective thanks for starting this discussion. I think the connection with insects is very important but I have a big problem with all these very small sub-sub-articles that are trying to do this topic justice. They tend to linger at low pageviews and they tend to overlap a lot. I think it's often better to rather add such content to the parent article: effects of climate change. I've written about that previously here a the talk page of WikiProject Climate Change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Climate_change/Archive_3#Do_we_need_so_many_sub-articles_on_effects_of_climate_change%3F and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Climate_change/Archive_4#Thoughts_on_climate_change_and_ecosystems_-_again_an_overlapping_article . So this kind of content about insects could theoretically be added at effects of climate change, climate change and ecosystems, climate change and birds or Effects of climate change on terrestrial animals. I find that a highly dissatisfactory situation given that we are only a dozen or so of active Wikipedians in the climate change space and we have to update and maintain lots of sub-articles. So in general, I am actually against creating sub-sub-articles about effects of climate change. Could we re-think the structure of sub-sub-articles for this topic and decide what we really need? EMsmile (talk) 13:29, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Oh and another aspect is that we should also add such climate change content into articles on birds and insects. It might even reach more readers that way. I contributed to that recently e.g. with dolphins, polar bear, pinniped. EMsmile (talk) 13:29, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
 * And with regards to the proposal of a new article Climate change and insects: Climate change will affect pretty much everything on Earth so we'd end up with a myriad of articles called "climate change and XX". Is that really useful? I doubt it. EMsmile (talk) 13:32, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Hi, thanks for your in-depth reply!
 * I agree with you in principle concerning duplicate content, difficulty of maintaining, low readership of separate articles and overlaps.
 * However, I think that in many cases merging articles is not the best solution, in many or most cases it would be better to have an article that is more in-depth about a specific subtopic of Effects of climate change (in this case) and one which there only are brief summaries about the topic. In specific and as mentioned above, I'd use transclusion for that, this would also make things easier to maintain and avoid outdated and duplicate content.
 * Concerning this article and as a concrete example, I'd keep this article but transclude its lead and contents from it to a section in Effects of climate change.
 * I also just thought about that such content is missing in the Insect (and probably arthropod) article. Its "#Relationship to humans" section does not include a section about impact of humans on insects but maybe that was intended. There should also be more easily findable info on the Decline of insect populations with a link to the "#Diversity" section. Thanks for adding such info to pendant articles.
 * I disagree with your last argument against creation of this new article: that's not a random thing impacted by climate change, various topics are of special interest in the research and management of climate change, and such an article could be more detailed than a hub/superordinate article, for example also including some information on mitigation options and info about likely consequences. And a myriad of articles can still be useful to some or many each, maybe what would be more useful instead is setting up a more visible indicator of article-quality and -up-to-dateness as well as making the superordinate articles more easily findable. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:02, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

Section on extinction risk, and do we even need this article at all?
Hi User:InformationToKnowledge: I am not sure if you have this article on your watchlist. It has a section on extinction risk. I suggest this section is updated or maybe just replaced with an expert from the updated article extinction risk from climate change. In addition, I wonder if this article shouldn't just be merged into effects of climate change on ecosystems? And perhaps some of it should be moved to Terrestrial animal. There is a higher likelihood of readers seeing it there than here.

In general, I think we don't need sub-articles of effects of climate change on animal XX but we should rather add climate change information to the "animal XX" article. EMsmile (talk) 07:07, 3 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I saw this article a while ago. In fact, I already mentioned it in another message on the extinction risk talk page, two months ago. Back then, I thought that this article should be deleted once its content is moved to the other articles, and I haven't changed my mind.
 * Back then, the most valuable part of this article was the section on livestock (mainly cattle) - as messy as it is, it had apparently been the only mention of these climate change impacts anywhere on Wikipedia! I argued back then that what we really need is an article on how livestock is impacted by the climate, and over the past week, I have done a lot to bring it closer to reality.
 * User:InformationToKnowledge/Effects of climate change on livestock draft
 * It is still not done yet, as it clearly needs images (I already have a few in mind) and a lot more information on animals besides cattle (though this partly reflects the research focus to date), but I should be able to push it to completion in the very near future. I'll be moving more content from this article to extinction risk and possibly elsewhere as well, at which point it should just be deleted.
 * And to be honest, I'm hardly happy with effects of climate change on ecosystems either. It's obviously missing a lot as an article (hence its multiple tags), but I also think it is fundamentally flawed beyond that. Namely, the way it presents information is currently very abritrary, and with a lot of overlap with existing articles. I considered looking at the list of ecosystems to fix it...except that one doesn't exist! The term "ecosystem" is so broad, it can cover thousands of permutations, which is good in real life, but is not a helpful basis for a finite article.
 * I would now suggest renaming that article to "effects of climate change on biomes". Biomes are much larger and are far better defined (we actually have a template with a list of them, for starters) and when people think of ecosystems, they usually mean biomes in the first place anyway. Using the list of biomes from the template + existing article content as a basis for creating an article with a section for each biome from the list would be a far better undertaking than the current version of that article. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 18:44, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Wow, you are amazing! You create new articles so effortlessly. How long did it take you to set up User:InformationToKnowledge/Effects of climate change on livestock draft and were you able to reuse much content from this article? When it's done, it should be linked from here which only has a short section on heat stress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change_on_agriculture#Heat_stress_of_livestock
 * Is there anything else from this article that can be moved to another article? And where would we redirect Effects of climate change on terrestrial animals to once it's been dissolved? Maybe simply to effects of climate change? Or to Effects of climate change on livestock draft?
 * Regarding the proposed title of effects of climate change on biomes I am not sure as the term "biome" seems so uncommon in every day usages. But apart from that, there are so many different biomes (see biome); an article that is trying to cover them all, with regards to the climate change effects, would be just huge, wouldn't it? EMsmile (talk) 10:21, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
 * I somehow didn't see this reply until now. Sorry!
 * But as you can see, it's taken me ~40 days to get the next major revision of the draft done (now finally moved to draft space), and 5 more days for my next work, so while I wish the process was effortless, it only seems that way. Assembling an coherent and comprehensive article takes time, especially for an article like the livestock one, where your main building blocks are paywalled papers in highly specialized journals. Compared to more "mainstream" avenues of climate change research, it can be a lot harder to find remotely suitable scientific figures from the papers with suitable license as well, so that draft isn't remotely as good-looking as I would have liked. For all that, I think it will be of great help in shining a light onto a subject so few seem to consider at any length.
 * Having looked at this article again, the main thing I got out of it was another draft.
 * Draft:Decline in wild mammal populations
 * Although, this draft ultimately takes a lot more of its content from three other articles. One of those is List of recently extinct mammals, which I have not seen before, and I think goes quite a bit beyond its scope, and should probably be trimmed to just the list itself once this draft is live. Besides chronicling a very real and frankly horrifying trend, this proposed article also helps to plug a gap where where we currently have either a "decline" article (insects, amphibians) or an "impacts of climate change" article (plants, birds) for seemingly every major group bar reptiles and mammals. (Now, it'll only be reptiles...haven't looked enough into the subject to decide which sub-article would be more suitable for them.)
 * Other than that, I moved a little more content to extinction risk from climate change again, and I think this is largely it. The main thing that's left here is the content on non-livestock diseases in the middle of the article. It cites three references (from ":2" to ":4") all of which seem very solid, yet none appear to be currently present in Climate change and infectious diseases. You seem to have been editing that other article a lot, so would you mind carrying those three references & whatever relevant material they have to it? Once that is done, I think we can finally get rid of it. If a redirect has to be there, it should probably be a disambiguation page to extinction risk, mammals and livestock articles.
 * Lastly, I believe that the ecosystem article has a rather low number of views already - undoubtedly in large part due to its currently duplicative and poorly organized nature, but the point stands. Even if biome is a lesser-known word (at least, for now), a properly organized, useful and easy to look at/navigate article will soon match and then exceed its number of views. A summary-style coverage of impacts on the primary biomes (two types of grassland, two-three types of forest (tropical, boreal and temperate), mountain habitats, wetlands, and presumably an excerpt on oceans and an entry on freshwater ecosystems) should have about as many subsections as effects of climate change (I see that's finally a GA!), and probably would not be much larger in total. It might become another sea level rise too, for sure, but I think we can manage it. The current ecosystems article mainly talks about forests, and has a little bit on montane and marine ecosystems (and Eagle River), so we are at least a third of the way there already, if not halfway.
 * However, that is probably some ways away. For now, my next goal is likely to be Effects of climate change on agriculture article, as all the research I have done for livestock article predictably had a lot of overlap, and while that article isn't bad, it could still be a lot better. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 18:44, 21 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Hi InformationToKnowledge OK, I have moved that textblock to Climate change and infectious diseases now. It's actually curious because a huge chunk was written and added by User:Operkins13 who hasn't more edits since then (?). - I look forward to seeing this article (Effects of climate change on terrestrial animals) disappear after any useful stuff has been moved. We really had far too many similar articles on this topic. EMsmile (talk) 08:00, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Great! Ideally, I would prefer that the sections moved get improved further later on - i.e. everything under "Effects on wildlife health" is completely devoid of internal links, and the example selection in both of those sections may seem a little arbitrary nowadays. Notably, the isolated reference to a 2002 death in Vancouver looks really strange over 20 years later, when no follow-up on the pathogen's spread is mentioned. I suspect that going back directly to those references may allow us to convey the same information (perhaps more) in a more elegant manner. For now, though, just removing it from that article is good enough.
 * Three other things which should probably be moved.
 * "Climate resilient crops for improving global food security and safety" reference - to somewhere in Effects of climate change on agriculture
 * "Threats to North American forests from southern pine beetle with warming winters" - to one of the forest subsections of effects of climate change on ecosystems (though it'll have to be corrected to proper reference format first).
 * "sympatric songbirds" reference - I might have included this in either extinction risk or climate change and birds articles, but it might well have gotten overlooked. If so, then if it draws explicit connections between quantified chance of going extinct, range declines, etc. and climate change scenarios, it belongs in the former, and if it's more general in its conclusions then probably in the latter.
 * There are also the links in "Further reading" - that article actually has two of those sections, for whatever reason. Most of them appear outdated and/or already featured in the extinction risk article, but a couple may still be useful. I'll have to give it a more detailed look again. After that, there is unlikely to be anything else useful.
 * P.S. This is not directly related, but I asked WikiProject:Chemicals for input on my earlier proposal to merge some of the sulfur aerosol articles.
 * Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Climate_change
 * Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Chemicals
 * With two users there in agreement, and the discussion on our own WikiProject kinda fizzling out back then, is it acceptable to go ahead with the proposed merges now, or should I wait for more input? InformationToKnowledge (talk) 09:20, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, I agree, additional improvements post-move are always welcome. I've condensed the information about that Vancouver fungus incident for now. I agree with your suggestions about moving the other stuff. With regards to "further reading" I usually just delete that from any article that I work on; usually there are no objections from the others. I think if the publication is important then it should have been cited in in-line citations already.
 * With regards to the aerosol issue, I would leave one more note on the talk page of WikiProject Climate Change if I were you saying "Based on xxx, I plan to do xxx in the next few days; I'll go ahead unless someone objects within the next 5 days" (and maybe move that thread to the bottom of the talk page to show that it's still "current"). I did that recently with my article name change of "economics of climate change" to economic analysis of climate change and felt confident to carry out my plan after nobody objected. EMsmile (talk) 09:38, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, I agree, additional improvements post-move are always welcome. I've condensed the information about that Vancouver fungus incident for now. I agree with your suggestions about moving the other stuff. With regards to "further reading" I usually just delete that from any article that I work on; usually there are no objections from the others. I think if the publication is important then it should have been cited in in-line citations already.
 * With regards to the aerosol issue, I would leave one more note on the talk page of WikiProject Climate Change if I were you saying "Based on xxx, I plan to do xxx in the next few days; I'll go ahead unless someone objects within the next 5 days" (and maybe move that thread to the bottom of the talk page to show that it's still "current"). I did that recently with my article name change of "economics of climate change" to economic analysis of climate change and felt confident to carry out my plan after nobody objected. EMsmile (talk) 09:38, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

Summary of work done
Hi User: InformationToKnowledge: could you please briefly summarise here where the content of the article "Effects of climate change on terrestrial animals" has mainly been moved to (or which parts were not useful and had to be deleted)? Just a very brief bullet point list. I think this would be useful in case people come here in future and wonder why we don't have the article "Effects of climate change on terrestrial animals" anymore and what happened to it. I've also just checked all the links to this article (using the "what links here" tool) and corrected them so that they don't point to an article anymore that doesn't exist anymore. I've also taken it out of the climate change template. EMsmile (talk) 08:18, 1 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Many thanks!
 * Reasons for merge, and a pretty good idea of what went to where, can already be glimpsed from the previous section, and from the discussion on our WikiProject: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Climate_change
 * Here is the list anyway:
 * The article was in a very poor state: most paragraphs were either completely uncited, or had only the most vague citations (plain "scientist name, year" with no links, or even title of the paper, was the most common type).
 * Further, this poor state was a byproduct of this article's fundamentally flawed scope. The phrase "terrestrial animals" just includes too many species which have little in common with each other besides living on land. I find it would be far better from the organizational standpoint to expand on the work already done with decline in amphibian populations and decline in insect populations and include all information on how climate change negatively impacts these classes of animals in such articles (as well as on individual species articles.)
 * Thus, I moved some information from this article to climate change and birds - which I would eventually rework into decline of bird populations - for consistency, and because bird population decline for reasons initially unrelated to climate change (but now increasingly interrelated with it) is a real subject which has not been adequately covered on the wiki yet. More information was moved to the impending decline of wild mammal populations (currently a draft).
 * Some more information from this article was moved to extinction risk from climate change. In my view, that article will serve both as way of immediately finding out which species are the most vulnerable to climate change, and as a "directory" connecting those current and future decline of articles from a climate change perspective.
 * Notably, the title of this article does not discriminate between wild and domestic terrestrial animals. Consequently, some 30-50% of word count was devoted to a single paper about the impact of heat stress in cows. After cleaning it up, I used that as the starting point for effects of climate change on livestock.
 * Finally, another large fraction was about infectious diseases - so you moved whatever was usable to climate change and infectious diseases. (By the way, is this one of the few climate change sub-articles whose title will not be changing to "Effects of" structure?)
 * This about covers it. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 12:45, 1 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Excellent!! Thanks so much. EMsmile (talk) 21:35, 1 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Excellent!! Thanks so much. EMsmile (talk) 21:35, 1 August 2023 (UTC)