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Assessing the effects of climate change on aquatic insects of alpine ponds Abstract When environmental conditions change, what determines whether biodiversity will be maintained? This question remains one of the greatest and most pressing challenges facing ecologists and evolutionary biologists because of the unprecedented magnitude of environmental change resulting from human activities. Accurate assessments of species' vulnerability to climate change require integrated measurements of its different drivers, including extrinsic (the magnitude and rate of climate change) and intrinsic factors (organisms' sensitivity and adaptive capacity). While most evaluations of species vulnerability rely on species distribution models, which allow predicting suitable habitat under future climatic conditions, these models often underestimate the actual species' ability to live under climatic conditions outside their realised niche. Measurements of the fundamental niche breadth and physiological plasticity could complement SDM providing a more complete estimation of species vulnerability. High-altitude systems, which harbour a high rate of endemism, are considered particularly vulnerable to climate change as they will experience some of the fastest rates of warming on the planet. Nonetheless, to date, predictions of the effects of climate change in alpine systems are scarce for standing water macroinvertebrates. Using as model system diving beetles restricted to Sierra Nevada mountain range, we have assessed the vulnerability to climate change in aquatic insect populations of alpine ponds by using an integrative methodology that combines distributional and climatic data, and thermal tolerance experiments. Species distribution models predict a virtual loss of climatically suitable area under different climate change scenarios. However, the studied taxa show heat tolerance limits above the predicted maximum temperatures in their current localities (but no capacity to adjust such limits through acclimation). Therefore, these beetles could have certain physiological capacity to deal with warming conditions in situ. Our results stress the importance of accounting for physiological tolerances when predicting the vulnerability to climate change in alpine freshwater biota.

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