One hundred years of climate change in Mexico

RESEARCH ARTICLE One hundred years of climate change in Mexico Angela P. Cuervo-RobayoID1,2, Carolina Ureta3, Miguel A. Go´ mez-AlboresID4, Anny K. Meneses-MosqueraID1, Oswaldo Te´llez-Valde´ s5, Enrique Martı´nez-Meyer1* 1 Departamento de Zoologı´a, Instituto de Biologı´a, Universidad Nacional Auto´ noma de Me´ xico, Ciudad de Me´xico, Me´ xico, 2 Comisio´ n Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (Conabio), Ciudad de Me´xico, Me´ xico, 3 Ca´tedras-Departamento de Ciencias Atmosfe´ricas, Centro de Ciencias de la Atmo´ sfera, Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico, Ciudad de Me´xico, Me´ xico, 4 Instituto Interamericano de Tecnologı´a y Ciencias del Agua, Universidad Auto´ noma del Estado de Me´ xico, Toluca, Estado de Me´xico, Me´xico, 5 Facultad de Estudios Superiores Iztacala, Unidad de Biotecnologı´a y Prototipos, Laboratorio de Recursos Naturales, Universidad Nacional Auto´ noma de Me´xico, Tlalnepantla, Me´ xico * emm@ib.unam.mx Abstract Spatial assessments of historical climate change provide information that can be used by scientists to analyze climate variation over time and evaluate, for example, its effects on bio- diversity, in order to focus their research and conservation efforts. Despite the fact that there are global climatic databases available at high spatial resolution, they represent a short tem- poral window that impedes evaluating historical changes of climate and their impacts on bio- diversity. To fill this gap, we developed climate gridded surfaces for Mexico for three periods

that cover most of the 20th and early 21st centuries: t1-1940 (1910–1949), t2-1970 (1950– 1979) and t3-2000 (1980–2009), and used these interpolated surfaces to describe how cli- mate has changed over time, both countrywide and in its 19 biogeographic provinces. Results from our characterization of climate change indicate that the mean annual tempera- ture has increased by nearly 0.2˚C on average across the whole country from t2-1970 to t3- 2000. However, changes have not been spatially uniform: Nearctic provinces in the north have suffered higher temperature increases than southern tropical regions. Central and southern provinces cooled at the beginning of the 20th century but warmed consistently since the 1970s. Precipitation increased between t1-1940 and t2-1970 across the country, more notably in the northern provinces, and it decreased between t2-1970 and t3-2000 in most of the country. Results on the historical climate conditions in Mexico may be useful for climate change analyses for both environmental and social sciences. Nonetheless, our cli- matology was based on information from climate stations for which 9.4–36.2% presented inhomogeneities over time probably owing to non-climatic factors, and climate station den- sity changed over time. Therefore, the estimated changes observed in our analysis need to be interpreted cautiously. PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209808 July 16, 2020 1 / 19 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Cuervo-Robayo AP, Ureta C, Go´mez-

Albores MA, Meneses-Mosquera AK, Te´llez-Valde´s O, Martı´nez-Meyer E (2020) One hundred years of climate change in Mexico. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0209808. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0209808 Editor: Lucas C.R. Silva, University of Oregon, UNITED STATES Received: December 7, 2018 Accepted: June 19, 2020 Published: July 16, 2020 Copyright: © 2020 Cuervo-Robayo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The National Commission for Biodiversity (CONABIO) is the repository for the data. We have provided all the information to CONABIO. We have included the URLs to access the data in Table 1. Funding: The Mexican Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologı´a (CONACyT) provided a Ph.D. scholarship to A.P.C-R (No. 217650). This work was funded by PAPIIT-DGAPA-UNAM to O.T-V. (Grant number IN-225010).