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The south-eastern coast of Australia is recognised as a climate-change hotspot; warming over the past 50 years has exceeded the global average. The marine fauna in the region is responding to this warming with several subtidal species showing a pole-ward range expansion. We provide the first evidence for a similar response in intertidal invertebrates, on the basis of surveys from the eastern coast of Tasmania in 2007-2008 that replicated a set from the 1950s. Of 29 species used in the analysis, 55% were detected further south than in the 1950s. The average minimum movement of the southern (pole-ward) range edges was 116 km (range 20-250 km), representing a rate of ~29 km per decade for a warming rate of 0.228C per decade. Barnacles and gastropods showed the greatest range extensions, with one species absent from Tasmania in the 1950s, the giant rock barnacle, Austromegabalanus nigrescens, now recorded widely along the eastern coast of Tasmania. The distance that the southern (pole-ward) range limit moved south for each species was not related to a qualitative dispersal potential index. Local extinction of some species in north-eastern Tasmania may also occur in the coming decades.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	climate change, distribution change, latitudinal range, pole-ward movement
Research Division:	Biological Sciences
Research Group:	Ecology
Research Field:	Marine and estuarine ecology (incl. marine ichthyology)
Objective Division:	Environmental Management
Objective Group:	Terrestrial systems and management
Objective Field:	Assessment and management of terrestrial ecosystems
UTAS Author:	Pitt, NR (Miss Nicole Pitt)
UTAS Author:	Hobday, AJ (Dr Alistair Hobday)
ID Code:	64873
Year Published:	2010
Web of Science® Times Cited:	82
Deposited By:	Zoology
Deposited On:	2010-09-09
Last Modified:	2015-07-09
Downloads:	3 View Download Statistics