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Chevalier M, Broennimann O, Guisan A. Climate change may reveal currently unavailable parts of species' ecological niches. Nat Ecol Evol 2024; 8:1298-1310. [PMID: 38811837 DOI: 10.1038/s41559-024-02426-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/02/2023] [Accepted: 04/29/2024] [Indexed: 05/31/2024]
Abstract
The ability of climatic niche models to predict species extinction risks can be hampered if niches are incompletely quantified. This can occur when niches are estimated considering only currently available climatic conditions, disregarding the fact that climate change can open up portions of the fundamental niche that are currently inaccessible to species. Using a new metric, we estimate the prevalence of potential situations of fundamental niche truncation by measuring whether current ecological niche limits are contiguous to the boundaries of currently available climatic conditions for 24,944 species at the global scale in both terrestrial and marine realms and including animals and plants. We show that 12,172 (~49%) species are showing niche contiguity, particularly those inhabiting tropical ecosystems and the marine realm. Using niche expansion scenarios, we find that 86% of species showing niche contiguity could have a fundamental niche potentially expanding beyond current climatic limits, resulting in lower-yet still alarming-rates of predicted biodiversity loss, particularly within the tropics. Caution is therefore advised when forecasting future distributions of species presenting niche contiguity, particularly towards climatic limits that are predicted to expand in the future.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mathieu Chevalier
- IFREMER, Centre de Bretagne, DYNECO, Laboratoire d'Ecologie Benthique Côtière, Plouzané, France.
| | - Olivier Broennimann
- Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
- Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
| | - Antoine Guisan
- Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
- Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
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Coelho MTP, Barreto E, Rangel TF, Diniz-Filho JAF, Wüest RO, Bach W, Skeels A, McFadden IR, Roberts DW, Pellissier L, Zimmermann NE, Graham CH. The geography of climate and the global patterns of species diversity. Nature 2023; 622:537-544. [PMID: 37758942 PMCID: PMC10584679 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06577-5] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/03/2022] [Accepted: 08/25/2023] [Indexed: 09/29/2023]
Abstract
Climate's effect on global biodiversity is typically viewed through the lens of temperature, humidity and resulting ecosystem productivity1-6. However, it is not known whether biodiversity depends solely on these climate conditions, or whether the size and fragmentation of these climates are also crucial. Here we shift the common perspective in global biodiversity studies, transitioning from geographic space to a climate-defined multidimensional space. Our findings suggest that larger and more isolated climate conditions tend to harbour higher diversity and species turnover among terrestrial tetrapods, encompassing more than 30,000 species. By considering both the characteristics of climate itself and its geographic attributes, we can explain almost 90% of the variation in global species richness. Half of the explanatory power (45%) may be attributed either to climate itself or to the geography of climate, suggesting a nuanced interplay between them. Our work evolves the conventional idea that larger climate regions, such as the tropics, host more species primarily because of their size7,8. Instead, we underscore the integral roles of both the geographic extent and degree of isolation of climates. This refined understanding presents a more intricate picture of biodiversity distribution, which can guide our approach to biodiversity conservation in an ever-changing world.
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Affiliation(s)
- Marco Túlio P Coelho
- Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland.
| | - Elisa Barreto
- Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland
| | - Thiago F Rangel
- Departamento de Ecologia, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, Brazil
| | | | - Rafael O Wüest
- Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland
| | - Wilhelmine Bach
- Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland
- Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution, Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems, Department of Environmental System Science, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland
| | - Alexander Skeels
- Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland
- Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution, Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems, Department of Environmental System Science, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland
| | - Ian R McFadden
- Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland
- Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution, Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems, Department of Environmental System Science, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland
- Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
| | - David W Roberts
- Ecology Department, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USA
| | - Loïc Pellissier
- Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland
- Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution, Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems, Department of Environmental System Science, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland
| | - Niklaus E Zimmermann
- Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland
| | - Catherine H Graham
- Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland
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3
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Conceição P, Morimoto J. 'Holey' niche! finding holes in niche hypervolumes using persistence homology. J Math Biol 2022; 84:58. [PMID: 35680762 PMCID: PMC9184459 DOI: 10.1007/s00285-022-01763-x] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/27/2022] [Revised: 05/09/2022] [Accepted: 05/21/2022] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
Living organisms are limited in the range of values of ecological factors they can explore. This defines where animals exist (or could exist) and forms an ecological fingerprint that explains species' distribution at global scales. Species' ecological fingerprints can be represented as a n-dimensional hypervolume - known as Hutchinson's niche hypervolume. This concept has enabled significant progress in our understanding of species' ecological needs and distributions across environmental gradients. Nevertheless, the properties of Hutchinson's n-dimensional hypervolumes can be challenging to calculate and several methods have been proposed to extract meaningful measurements of hypervolumes' properties. One key property of hypervolumes are holes, which provide important information about the ecological occupancy of species. However, to date, current methods rely on volume estimates and set operations to identify holes in hypervolumes. Yet, this approach can be problematic because in high-dimensions, the volume of region enclosing a hole tends to zero. We propose the use of persistence homology (PH) to identify holes in hypervolumes and in ecological datasets more generally. PH allows for the estimates of topological properties in n-dimensional niche hypervolumes independent of the volume estimates of the hypervolume. We demonstrate the application of PH to canonical datasets and to the identification of holes in the hypervolumes of five vertebrate species with diverse niches, highlighting the potential benefits of this approach to gain further insights into animal ecology. Overall, our approach enables the study of a yet unexplored property of Hutchinson's hypervolumes, and thus, have important implications to our understanding of animal ecology.
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Affiliation(s)
- Pedro Conceição
- Institute of Mathematics, University of Aberdeen, King's College, Aberdeen, AB24 3FX, Scotland
| | - Juliano Morimoto
- Institute of Mathematics, University of Aberdeen, King's College, Aberdeen, AB24 3FX, Scotland. .,School of Biological Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Zoology Building, Tillydrone Ave, Aberdeen, AB24 2TZ, Scotland. .,Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia e Conservação, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, 82590-300, Brazil. .,Institute of Differential Geometry, Riemann Centre for Geometry and Physics, Welfengarten 1, 30167, Hannover, Germany.
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