Journal ArticleDOI
Niche breadth predicts geographical range size: a general ecological pattern.
TLDR
Despite significant variability in the strength of the relationship among studies, the general positive relationship suggests that specialist species might be disproportionately vulnerable to habitat loss and climate change due to synergistic effects of a narrow niche and small range size.Abstract:
The range of resources that a species uses (i.e. its niche breadth) might determine the geographical area it can occupy, but consensus on whether a niche breadth–range size relationship generally exists among species has been slow to emerge. The validity of this hypothesis is a key question in ecology in that it proposes a mechanism for commonness and rarity, and if true, may help predict species' vulnerability to extinction. We identified 64 studies that measured niche breadth and range size, and we used a meta-analytic approach to test for the presence of a niche breadth–range size relationship. We found a significant positive relationship between range size and environmental tolerance breadth (z = 0.49), habitat breadth (z = 0.45), and diet breadth (z = 0.28). The overall positive effect persisted even when incorporating sampling effects. Despite significant variability in the strength of the relationship among studies, the general positive relationship suggests that specialist species might be disproportionately vulnerable to habitat loss and climate change due to synergistic effects of a narrow niche and small range size. An understanding of the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that drive and cause deviations from this niche breadth–range size pattern is an important future research goal.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Museums and cradles of diversity are geographically coincident for narrowly distributed Neotropical snakes
Josué A. R. Azevedo,Thaís B. Guedes,Cristiano Nogueira,Paulo Passos,Ricardo J. Sawaya,Ana Lúcia da Costa Prudente,Fausto Erritto Barbo,Christine Strüssmann,Francisco Luís Franco,Vanesa Arzamendia,Alejandro R. Giraudo,Antônio Jorge Suzart Argôlo,Martin Jansen,Hussam Zaher,João Filipe Riva Tonini,João Filipe Riva Tonini,Søren Faurby,Alexandre Antonelli,Alexandre Antonelli +18 more
Journal ArticleDOI
Tropical specialist vs. climate generalist: Diversification and demographic history of sister species of Carlia skinks from northwestern Australia.
Ana C. Afonso Silva,Ana C. Afonso Silva,Jason G. Bragg,Sally Potter,Carlos Fernandes,Maria M. Coelho,Craig Moritz +6 more
TL;DR: Test the hypothesis that tropical specialists are more sensitive to climate change than climate generalists by comparing scales of historical persistence and population fluctuation in two sister species of Australian rainbow skinks and finds some populations from the northern Kimberley islands are highly divergent from mainland populations.
Journal ArticleDOI
Morphological variation in salamanders and their potential response to climate change
Gentile Francesco Ficetola,Gentile Francesco Ficetola,Gentile Francesco Ficetola,Emiliano Colleoni,Julien Renaud,Julien Renaud,Stefano Scali,Emilio Padoa-Schioppa,Wilfried Thuiller,Wilfried Thuiller +9 more
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that in old-world salamanders, NTV variation is strongly related to changes in body size and this two-step analysis demonstrates that ectothermic vertebrates may evolve in response to climate change by modifying the number of thoracic vertebrae.
Journal ArticleDOI
Repeated evolution of camouflage in speciose desert rodents
Zbyszek Boratyński,José Carlos Brito,João Carlos Campos,José L. Cunha,Laurent Granjon,Tapio Mappes,Arame Ndiaye,Barbara Rzebik-Kowalska,Nina Serén +8 more
TL;DR: It is found that camouflage has been acquired and lost repeatedly in the course of the evolutionary history of Gerbillus, suggesting that fur colouration and its covariation with habitat is a relatively labile character in mammals, potentially responding quickly to selection.
Journal ArticleDOI
On the role of host phenotypic plasticity in host shifting by parasites.
TL;DR: It is argued that phenotypic variation in hosts arising from environmental variation (phenotypic plasticity) can promote shifts in parasites by bridging both spatiotemporal and phenotypesic gaps between ancestral and novel hosts.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
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