Birds track their Grinnellian niche through a century of climate change
TLDR
The results indicate that the factors limiting a bird species' range in the Sierra Nevada in the early 20th century also tended to drive changes in distribution over time, suggesting that climatic models derived from niche theory might be used successfully to forecast where and how to conserve species in the face of climate change.Abstract:
In the face of environmental change, species can evolve new physiological tolerances to cope with altered climatic conditions or move spatially to maintain existing physiological associations with particular climates that define each species' climatic niche When environmental change occurs over short temporal and large spatial scales, vagile species are expected to move geographically by tracking their climatic niches through time Here, we test for evidence of niche tracking in bird species of the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, focusing on 53 species resurveyed nearly a century apart at 82 sites on four elevational transects Changes in climate and bird distributions resulted in focal species shifting their average climatological range over time By comparing the directions of these shifts relative to the centroids of species' range-wide climatic niches, we found that 48 species (906%) tracked their climatic niche Analysis of niche sensitivity on an independent set of occurrence data significantly predicted the temperature and precipitation gradients tracked by species Furthermore, in 50 species (943%), site-specific occupancy models showed that the position of each site relative to the climatic niche centroid explained colonization and extinction probabilities better than a null model with constant probabilities Combined, our results indicate that the factors limiting a bird species' range in the Sierra Nevada in the early 20th century also tended to drive changes in distribution over time, suggesting that climatic models derived from niche theory might be used successfully to forecast where and how to conserve species in the face of climate changeread more
Citations
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Niche conservatism as an emerging principle in ecology and conservation biology.
John J. Wiens,David D. Ackerly,Andrew P. Allen,Brian L. Anacker,Lauren B. Buckley,Howard V. Cornell,Ellen I. Damschen,T. Jonathan Davies,T. Jonathan Davies,John-Arvid Grytnes,Susan Harrison,Bradford A. Hawkins,Robert D. Holt,Christy M. McCain,Patrick R. Stephens +14 more
TL;DR: The mounting evidence for the importance of niche conservatism to major topics in ecology and conservation and other areas where it may be important but has generally been overlooked is described.
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Uses and misuses of bioclimatic envelope modeling
TL;DR: Critics of bioclimatic envelope models are reviewed to suggest that criticism has often been misplaced, resulting from confusion between what the models actually deliver and what users wish that they would express.
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How Should Beta-Diversity Inform Biodiversity Conservation?
TL;DR: How beta-diversity is impacted by human activities, including farming, selective logging, urbanization, species invasions, overhunting, and climate change is reviewed.
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How does climate change cause extinction
Abigail E. Cahill,Matthew E. Aiello-Lammens,M. Caitlin Fisher-Reid,Xia Hua,Caitlin J. Karanewsky,Hae Yeong Ryu,Gena C. Sbeglia,Fabrizio Spagnolo,John B. Waldron,Omar Warsi,John J. Wiens +10 more
TL;DR: The proximate causes of climate-change related extinctions and their empirical support are reviewed to support the idea that changing species interactions are an important cause of documented population declines and extinctions related to climate change.
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Biodiversity and Climate Change: Integrating Evolutionary and Ecological Responses of Species and Communities
TL;DR: The potential role of the emerging synthetic disci- pline of evolutionary community ecology in improving the authors' understanding of how climate change will alter future distribution of biodiversity is examined.
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