Testing the climate niche framework for amphibian extinction risk

The climate niche is a widely used framework for evaluating extinction risk under climate change[1–3] but has yet to be extensively tested in the context of historical extinctions. Here, we propose to use comparative extinction risk modelling[4] to evaluate leading climate impact models in terms of how well they predict historical transitions in IUCN Red List categories for 6,288 amphibian species between 1980 and 2021[5]. Species distribution models and exposure metrics based on the climate niche framework do not predict extinction risk once accounting for species range area, a strong determinant of extinction risk. However, changes in average climate conditions across range areas do provide significant additional predictive power, with higher risk for species that have experienced faster warming or larger changes in the seasonality of precipitation. Moreover, the modeled importance of average climate conditions for extinction risk across amphibians has increased between 1980-2004 and 2004-2021. These results demonstrate that while climate change is playing an increasingly important role in elevating amphibian extinction risk, widely used methods for assessing these risks across species do not appear to accurately reflect this pattern historically.