Animals in tropical and Mediterranean areas are the most sensitive to climate change and land use pressures, finds a new study by UCL researchers. The findings, published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution , show how extinction risks are not evenly distributed worldwide, and suggest that large declines in tropical biodiversity are likely to occur imminently.

Global animal populations have on average declined by two-thirds in less than half a century, according to the WWF's Living Planet Report 2020 involving UCL researchers, released today.

The impacts of predator loss and climate change are combining to devastate living reefs that have defined Alaskan kelp forests for centuries, according to new research published in Science. "We discovered that massive limestone reefs built by algae underpin the Aleutian Islands' kelp forest ecosystem," said Douglas Rasher, a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and the lead author of the study.

Changes in the Earth's climate over the last 66 million years have been revealed in unprecedented detail by a team involving UCL researchers, highlighting four distinctive climatic states and the natural millionand thousand-year variability that Earth's climate has experienced.