Climate change poses a number of challenges to plants and animals. For example, as the climate changes, appropriate climatic conditions for many species are changing, and some may disappear altogether. This can become even more severe as the climate is changing together with other human-caused changes, such as land use for agriculture. When there is increasing divergence between the climatic conditions suitable for a particular species and its abundance and distribution through time, this is known as climate decoupling. For example, the grasshopper sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum) lives in grasslands across North America and was once quite common in these habitats. However, because grasslands continue to be degraded or lost, this has hindered this grassland specialist species from fully adjusting to changing climatic conditions. Climate decoupling, together with habitat loss, may explain the observed high rates of grasshopper sparrow abundance declines and local extinctions.
