Ecological niche conservatism: a time-structured review of evidence

doi:10.1111/J.1365-2699.2010.02456.X

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Ecological niche conservatism: a time-structured review of evidence

Journal Article•DOI•

Ecological niche conservatism: a time-structured review of evidence

A. Townsend Peterson¹•Institutions (1)

University of Kansas¹

01 May 2011-Journal of Biogeography (Blackwell Publishing Ltd)-Vol. 38, Iss: 5, pp 817-827

TL;DR: To evaluate the evolutionary conservatism of coarse‐resolution Grinnellian (or scenopoetic) ecological niches, a large number of studies have found that the latter are more conservative than the former.

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Abstract: Aim To evaluate the evolutionary conservatism of coarse-resolution Grinnellian (or scenopoetic) ecological niches. Location Global. Methods I review a broad swathe of literature relevant to the topic of niche conservatism or differentiation, and illustrate some of the resulting insights with examplar analyses. Results Ecological niche characteristics are highly conserved over short-to-moderate time spans (i.e. from individual life spans up to tens or hundreds of thousands of years); little or no ecological niche differentiation is discernible as part of the processes of invasion or speciation. Main conclusions Although niche conservatism is widespread, many methodological complications obscure this point. In particular, niche models are frequently over-interpreted: too often, they are based on limited occurrence data in high-dimensional environmental spaces, and cannot be interpreted robustly to indicate niche differentiation.

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Journal Article•DOI•

The crucial role of the accessible area in ecological niche modeling and species distribution modeling

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Narayani Barve¹, Vijay Barve¹, Alberto Jiménez-Valverde¹, Andrés Lira-Noriega¹, Sean P. Maher¹, A. Townsend Peterson¹, Jorge Soberón¹, Fabricio Villalobos² - Show less +4 more•Institutions (2)

University of Kansas¹, National Autonomous University of Mexico²

10 Jun 2011-Ecological Modelling

TL;DR: This paper explored the conceptual and empirical reasons behind choice of extent of study area in such analyses, and offer practical, but conceptually justified, reasoning for such decisions, and asserted that the area that has been accessible to the species of interest over relevant time periods represents the ideal area for model development, testing, and comparison.

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1,324 citations

Cites background from "Ecological niche conservatism: a ti..."

...Nonetheless, in our example above (and ikely also in other studies), the time frame (135,000BP) used may otbe large enough for evolutionaryprocesses to takeplace, at least or vertebrates and other long-lived species (Rodríguez-Trelles and odríguez, 1998; Peterson, 2011)....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Uses and misuses of bioclimatic envelope modeling

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Miguel B. Araújo¹, Miguel B. Araújo², Miguel B. Araújo³, A. Townsend Peterson⁴•Institutions (4)

University of Copenhagen¹, University of Évora², Spanish National Research Council³, University of Kansas⁴

01 Jul 2012-Ecology

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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Abstract: Bioclimatic envelope models use associations between aspects of climate and species' occurrences to estimate the conditions that are suitable to maintain viable populations. Once bioclimatic envelopes are characterized, they can be applied to a variety of questions in ecology, evolution, and conservation. However, some have questioned the usefulness of these models, because they may be based on implausible assumptions or may be contradicted by empirical evidence. We review these areas of contention, and suggest that criticism has often been misplaced, resulting from confusion between what the models actually deliver and what users wish that they would express. Although improvements in data and methods will have some effect, the usefulness of these models is contingent on their appropriate use, and they will improve mainly via better awareness of their conceptual basis, strengths, and limitations.

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873 citations

Cites background from "Ecological niche conservatism: a ti..."

...Increasingly, evolutionary ecologists are using bioclimatic envelope models to ask questions regarding the rates of change of niche traits across phylogenies (Wiens and Graham 2005, Peterson 2011)....
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...C O N C E P TS & S YN TH E S IS fundamental niche are being occupied by the species in different regions and times (e.g., Nogués-Bravo et al. 2008, Soberón and Peterson 2011)....
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...Key words: biodiversity; biogeography; climate change; climate envelopes; conservation planning; ecological niches; invasions; niche conservation; restoration ecology; species distributions; translocation experiments; uncertainty in prediction....
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...…it is reasonable to expect that some significant degree of conservatism of the fundamental niches exists that provides predictability across taxa, environmental dimensions, and time frames considered in most studies using bioclimatic envelope models (e.g., Kozak and Wiens 2006, Peterson 2011)....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Climatic niche shifts are rare among terrestrial plant invaders

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Blaise Petitpierre¹, Christoph Kueffer², Christoph Kueffer³, Olivier Broennimann¹, Christophe F. Randin⁴, Curtis C. Daehler³, Antoine Guisan¹ - Show less +3 more•Institutions (4)

University of Lausanne¹, ETH Zurich², University of Hawaii at Manoa³, University of Basel⁴

16 Mar 2012-Science

TL;DR: It is shown that when analog climates are compared between regions, fewer than 15% of species have more than 10% of their invaded distribution outside their native climatic niche, revealing that substantial niche shifts are rare in terrestrial plant invaders.

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Abstract: The assumption that climatic niche requirements of invasive species are conserved between their native and invaded ranges is key to predicting the risk of invasion. However, this assumption has been challenged recently by evidence of niche shifts in some species. Here, we report the first large-scale test of niche conservatism for 50 terrestrial plant invaders between Eurasia, North America, and Australia. We show that when analog climates are compared between regions, fewer than 15% of species have more than 10% of their invaded distribution outside their native climatic niche. These findings reveal that substantial niche shifts are rare in terrestrial plant invaders, providing support for an appropriate use of ecological niche models for the prediction of both biological invasions and responses to climate change.

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692 citations

Book•

Habitat Suitability and Distribution Models

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Antoine Guisan¹, Wilfried Thuiller², Niklaus E. Zimmermann•Institutions (2)

University of Lausanne¹, University of Grenoble²

01 Sep 2017

TL;DR: In this article, the authors introduce the key stages of niche-based habitat suitability model building, evaluation and prediction required for understanding and predicting future patterns of species and biodiversity, including the main theory behind ecological niches and species distributions.

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Abstract: This book introduces the key stages of niche- based habitat suitability model building, evaluation and prediction required for understanding and predicting future patterns of species and biodiversity. Beginning with the main theory behind ecological niches and species distributions, the book proceeds through all major steps of model building, from conceptualization and model training to model evaluation and spatio- temporal predictions. Extensive examples using R support graduate students and researchers in quantifying ecological niches and predicting species distributions with their own data, and help to address key environmental and conservation problems. Reflecting this highly active field of research, the book incorporates the latest developments from informatics and statistics, as well as using data from remote sources such as satellite imagery. A website at www.unil.ch/ hsdm contains the codes and supporting material required to run the examples and teach courses. All three authors are recognized specialists of and have contributed substantially to the development of spatial prediction methods for species’ habitat suitability and distribution modeling. They published a large number of papers, overall cumulating tens of thousands of citations, and are ISI Highly Cited Researchers.

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632 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

Unifying niche shift studies: insights from biological invasions.

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Antoine Guisan¹, Blaise Petitpierre¹, Olivier Broennimann¹, Curtis C. Daehler², Christoph Kueffer³ - Show less +1 more•Institutions (3)

University of Lausanne¹, University of Hawaii at Manoa², ETH Zurich³

01 May 2014-Trends in Ecology and Evolution

TL;DR: A review of empirical studies of invasion is built on to formalize a unifying framework that decomposes niche change into unfilling, stability, and expansion situations, taking both a pooled range and range-specific perspective on the niche, while accounting for climatic availability and climatic analogy.

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Abstract: Assessing whether the climatic niche of a species may change between different geographic areas or time periods has become increasingly important in the context of ongoing global change. However, approaches and findings have remained largely controversial so far, calling for a unification of methods. Here, we build on a review of empirical studies of invasion to formalize a unifying framework that decomposes niche change into unfilling, stability, and expansion situations, taking both a pooled range and range-specific perspective on the niche, while accounting for climatic availability and climatic analogy. This framework provides new insights into the nature of climate niche shifts and our ability to anticipate invasions, and may help in guiding the design of experiments for assessing causes of niche changes.

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491 citations

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References

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Journal Article•DOI•

Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas.

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Robert J. Hijmans¹, Susan E. Cameron¹, Susan E. Cameron², Juan L. Parra¹, Peter G. Jones³, Andy Jarvis³ - Show less +2 more•Institutions (3)

Museum of Vertebrate Zoology¹, University of Queensland², International Center for Tropical Agriculture³

01 Dec 2005-International Journal of Climatology

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas (excluding Antarctica) at a spatial resolution of 30 arc s (often referred to as 1-km spatial resolution).

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Abstract: We developed interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas (excluding Antarctica) at a spatial resolution of 30 arc s (often referred to as 1-km spatial resolution). The climate elements considered were monthly precipitation and mean, minimum, and maximum temperature. Input data were gathered from a variety of sources and, where possible, were restricted to records from the 1950–2000 period. We used the thin-plate smoothing spline algorithm implemented in the ANUSPLIN package for interpolation, using latitude, longitude, and elevation as independent variables. We quantified uncertainty arising from the input data and the interpolation by mapping weather station density, elevation bias in the weather stations, and elevation variation within grid cells and through data partitioning and cross validation. Elevation bias tended to be negative (stations lower than expected) at high latitudes but positive in the tropics. Uncertainty is highest in mountainous and in poorly sampled areas. Data partitioning showed high uncertainty of the surfaces on isolated islands, e.g. in the Pacific. Aggregating the elevation and climate data to 10 arc min resolution showed an enormous variation within grid cells, illustrating the value of high-resolution surfaces. A comparison with an existing data set at 10 arc min resolution showed overall agreement, but with significant variation in some regions. A comparison with two high-resolution data sets for the United States also identified areas with large local differences, particularly in mountainous areas. Compared to previous global climatologies, ours has the following advantages: the data are at a higher spatial resolution (400 times greater or more); more weather station records were used; improved elevation data were used; and more information about spatial patterns of uncertainty in the data is available. Owing to the overall low density of available climate stations, our surfaces do not capture of all variation that may occur at a resolution of 1 km, particularly of precipitation in mountainous areas. In future work, such variation might be captured through knowledgebased methods and inclusion of additional co-variates, particularly layers obtained through remote sensing. Copyright  2005 Royal Meteorological Society.

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17,977 citations

"Ecological niche conservatism: a ti..." refers background or methods in this paper

..., 2007), but what is special or sacred about 19? In truth, the number comes from the fact that the WorldClim archive conveniently provides 19 ‘bioclimatic’ variables (Hijmans et al., 2005)....
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...…these questions, at least heuristically, I created a virtual species following Hirzel et al. (2001) in a 7-dimensional climate space using bioclimatic variables from the WorldClim archive (Hijmans et al., 2005), in which each dimension had been standardized to a mean of zero and variance of unity....
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...In truth, the number comes from the fact that the WorldClim archive conveniently provides 19 ‘bioclimatic’ variables (Hijmans et al., 2005)....
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...(2001) in a 7-dimensional climate space using bioclimatic variables from the WorldClim archive (Hijmans et al., 2005), in which each dimension had been standardized to a mean of zero and variance of unity....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Novel methods improve prediction of species' distributions from occurrence data

[...]

Jane Elith¹, Catherine H. Graham², Robert P. Anderson³, Miroslav Dudík⁴, Simon Ferrier, Antoine Guisan⁵, Robert J. Hijmans⁶, Falk Huettmann⁷, John R. Leathwick⁸, Anthony Lehmann, Jin Li⁹, Lúcia G. Lohmann¹⁰, Bette A. Loiselle¹¹, Glenn Manion, Craig Moritz⁶, Miguel Nakamura¹², Yoshinori Nakazawa¹³, Jacob C. M. Mc Overton¹⁴, A. Townsend Peterson¹³, Steven J. Phillips¹⁵, Karen Richardson¹⁶, Ricardo Scachetti-Pereira, Robert E. Schapire, Jorge Soberón¹³, Stephen E. Williams¹⁷, Mary S. Wisz, Niklaus E. Zimmermann¹⁸ - Show less +23 more•Institutions (18)

University of Melbourne¹, Stony Brook University², City University of New York³, Princeton University⁴, University of Lausanne⁵, University of California, Berkeley⁶, University of Alaska Fairbanks⁷, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research⁸, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation⁹, University of São Paulo¹⁰, University of Missouri¹¹, Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología¹², University of Kansas¹³, Landcare Research¹⁴, AT&T¹⁵, McGill University¹⁶, James Cook University¹⁷, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research¹⁸

01 Apr 2006-Ecography

TL;DR: This work compared 16 modelling methods over 226 species from 6 regions of the world, creating the most comprehensive set of model comparisons to date and found that presence-only data were effective for modelling species' distributions for many species and regions.

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Abstract: Prediction of species' distributions is central to diverse applications in ecology, evolution and conservation science. There is increasing electronic access to vast sets of occurrence records in museums and herbaria, yet little effective guidance on how best to use this information in the context of numerous approaches for modelling distributions. To meet this need, we compared 16 modelling methods over 226 species from 6 regions of the world, creating the most comprehensive set of model comparisons to date. We used presence-only data to fit models, and independent presence-absence data to evaluate the predictions. Along with well-established modelling methods such as generalised additive models and GARP and BIOCLIM, we explored methods that either have been developed recently or have rarely been applied to modelling species' distributions. These include machine-learning methods and community models, both of which have features that may make them particularly well suited to noisy or sparse information, as is typical of species' occurrence data. Presence-only data were effective for modelling species' distributions for many species and regions. The novel methods consistently outperformed more established methods. The results of our analysis are promising for the use of data from museums and herbaria, especially as methods suited to the noise inherent in such data improve.

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7,589 citations

"Ecological niche conservatism: a ti..." refers methods in this paper

...…data sets was employed, thus avoiding problems with autocorrelation and non-independence of training and testing samples (eliminating, for example, Elith et al., 2006); and (3) the focus was on coarse-resolution variables (i.e. the ‘scenopoetic’ variables of Hutchinson; see Soberón, 2007),…...
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Journal Article•DOI•

AUC: a misleading measure of the performance of predictive distribution models

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Jorge M. Lobo¹, Alberto Jiménez-Valverde¹, Raimundo Real²•Institutions (2)

Spanish National Research Council¹, University of Málaga²

01 Mar 2008-Global Ecology and Biogeography

TL;DR: The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, known as the AUC, is currently considered to be the standard method to assess the accuracy of predictive distribution models as discussed by the authors.

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Abstract: The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, known as the AUC, is currently considered to be the standard method to assess the accuracy of predictive distribution models. It avoids the supposed subjectivity in the threshold selection process, when continuous probability derived scores are converted to a binary presence‐absence variable, by summarizing overall model performance over all possible thresholds. In this manuscript we review some of the features of this measure and bring into question its reliability as a comparative measure of accuracy between model results. We do not recommend using AUC for five reasons: (1) it ignores the predicted probability values and the goodness-of-fit of the model; (2) it summarises the test performance over regions of the ROC space in which one would rarely operate; (3) it weights omission and commission errors equally; (4) it does not give information about the spatial distribution of model errors; and, most importantly, (5) the total extent to which models are carried out highly influences the rate of well-predicted absences and the AUC scores.

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2,711 citations

"Ecological niche conservatism: a ti..." refers background in this paper

...As such, direct comparisons among studies and across taxa, regions or biomes are complicated for methodological and artefactual reasons, as has been pointed out recently in several publications (Peterson et al., 2007, 2008; Lobo et al., 2008; Warren et al., 2008)....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Niche Conservatism: Integrating Evolution, Ecology, and Conservation Biology

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John J. Wiens¹, Catherine H. Graham¹•Institutions (1)

Stony Brook University¹

10 Nov 2005-Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics

TL;DR: This work describes how niche conservatism in climatic tolerances may limit geographic range expansion and how this one type of niche conservatism may be important in allopatric speciation and the spread of invasive, human-introduced species.

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Abstract: ▪ Abstract Niche conservatism is the tendency of species to retain ancestral ecological characteristics. In the recent literature, a debate has emerged as to whether niches are conserved. We suggest that simply testing whether niches are conserved is not by itself particularly helpful or interesting and that a more useful focus is on the patterns that niche conservatism may (or may not) create. We focus specifically on how niche conservatism in climatic tolerances may limit geographic range expansion and how this one type of niche conservatism may be important in (a) allopatric speciation, (b) historical biogeography, (c) patterns of species richness, (d) community structure, (e) the spread of invasive, human-introduced species, (f) responses of species to global climate change, and (g) human history, from 13,000 years ago to the present. We describe how these effects of niche conservatism can be examined with new tools for ecological niche modeling.

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2,039 citations

"Ecological niche conservatism: a ti..." refers background in this paper

...While I agree with Wiens & Graham (2005) that simply testing for conservatism in and of itself is not of particular interest, I see the challenge of understanding and characterizing the temporal dimensions of ecological innovation as being of great interest....
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...For example, Wiens & Graham (2005) pointed out the many dimensions in which niche conservatism has pervasive influences across evolutionary biology and biogeography....
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...Subsequent discussions and reviews of the subject (Ackerly, 2003; Wiens & Graham, 2005; Losos, 2008; Pearman et al., 2008; Warren et al., 2008; Wiens, 2008) have shed new light on the issue, particularly as additional evidence has accumulated....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Environmental niche equivalency versus conservatism: quantitative approaches to niche evolution.

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Dan L. Warren¹, Richard E. Glor², Michael Turelli¹•Institutions (2)

University of California, Davis¹, University of Rochester²

01 Nov 2008-Evolution

TL;DR: New methods for quantifying niche overlap that rely on a traditional ecological measure and a metric from mathematical statistics are developed and suggest various randomization tests that may prove useful in other areas of ecology and evolutionary biology.

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Abstract: Environmental niche models, which are generated by combining species occurrence data with environmental GIS data layers, are increasingly used to answer fundamental questions about niche evolution, speciation, and the accumulation of ecological diversity within clades. The question of whether environmental niches are conserved over evolutionary time scales has attracted considerable attention, but often produced conflicting conclusions. This conflict, however, may result from differences in how niche similarity is measured and the specific null hypothesis being tested. We develop new methods for quantifying niche overlap that rely on a traditional ecological measure and a metric from mathematical statistics. We reexamine a classic study of niche conservatism between sister species in several groups of Mexican animals, and, for the first time, address alternative definitions of "niche conservatism" within a single framework using consistent methods. As expected, we find that environmental niches of sister species are more similar than expected under three distinct null hypotheses, but that they are rarely identical. We demonstrate how our measures can be used in phylogenetic comparative analyses by reexamining niche divergence in an adaptive radiation of Cuban anoles. Our results show that environmental niche overlap is closely tied to geographic overlap, but not to phylogenetic distances, suggesting that niche conservatism has not constrained local communities in this group to consist of closely related species. We suggest various randomization tests that may prove useful in other areas of ecology and evolutionary biology.

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1,993 citations

"Ecological niche conservatism: a ti..." refers background or methods or result in this paper

...While the difference of opinion is partly a result of methodological artefact (Warren et al., 2008), it also reflects the immature nature of this field and the preliminary nature of the data and methods available, suggesting the need for synthesis and summary....
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...As a result of this review, niche conservatism can be seen to be highly dependent on the timescale of the comparison, the resolution and extent of the analysis, and the details of model fitting and comparisons, particularly as regards the null hypotheses being tested (Warren et al., 2008)....
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...Subsequent discussions and reviews of the subject (Ackerly, 2003; Wiens & Graham, 2005; Losos, 2008; Pearman et al., 2008; Warren et al., 2008; Wiens, 2008) have shed new light on the issue, particularly as additional evidence has accumulated....
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...Warren et al. (2008) did offer the caveat that ‘the probabilities obtained would accurately reflect the probabilities under the null hypothesis if the sampling of each species was unbiased with respect to its environmental tolerances’....
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...As recently emphasized in the design of tools offered by Warren et al. (2008), and as has been clear in recent re-analyses of previous research results (see, for example, the case of Mexican jays and the different conclusions reached by Peterson & Holt, 2003; Rice et al., 2003; and McCormack et…...
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