NEW HAVEN, Connecticut, March 31, 2025 (ENS) – Climate change is altering butterfly habitats, turning their species-rich, mountain refuges into traps, finds new research by U.S. and German scientists. They think of it as the butterfly effect – the idea that a small event can have a big, unpredictable influence on the future – in reverse. A large, global series of events is affecting tiny butterflies. Mountaintops are inhabited by many of the world’s most diverse clusters of butterfly species, but new research shows that climate change could turn those habitats into traps. For the study, a team co-led by Yale University ecologist Walter Jetz analyzed phylogenetic and geographic range data for more than 12,000 butterfly species worldwide. Director of the Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change and its Max Planck-Yale Center for Biodiversity Movement and Global Change, Jetz arrived at Yale in 2009 and is a professor in the university’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department and in the School of the Environment. He also serves as Scientific Chair of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation . The new study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution under the title, “Global hotspots of butterfly diversity are threatened in a warming world,” suggests that a lack of comprehensive global data about insects leaves conservationists and policymakers poorly-prepared to reduce biodiversity loss from climate change for many insect species. The research team was co-led by Stefan Pinkert, an insect scientist at the Philipps University of Marburg, in Germany, and a former postdoctoral associate at Yale. The scientists found that butterfly diversity is clustered in tropical and subtropical mountains. Two-thirds of butterfly species live in the mountains, which contain 3.5 times more butterfly hotspots than lowlands do. Yet mountain ecosystems and surrounding areas are being altered by the changing climate. The […]