Climate Change and Local Host Availability Drive the Northern Range Boundary in the Rapid Expansion of a Specialist Insect Herbivore, Papilio cresphontes

Abstract

Species distributions, abundance, and interactions have always been influenced by human activity and are currently experiencing rapid change. Biodiversity benchmark surveys traditionally require intense human labor inputs to find, identify, and record organisms limiting the rate and impact of scientific enquiry and discovery. Recent emergence and advancement of monitoring technologies have improved biodiversity data collection to a scale and scope previously unimaginable. Community science web platforms, smartphone applications, and technology assisted identification have expedited the speed and enhanced the volume of observational data all while providing open access to these data worldwide. How to integrate and leverage the data into valuable information on how species are changing in space and time requires new best practices in computational and analytical approaches. Here we integrate data from three community science repositories to explore how a specialist herbivore distribution changes in relation to host plant distributions and other environmental factors. We generate a series of temporally explicit species distribution models to generate range predictions for a specialist insect herbivore (Papilio cresphontes) and three predominant host-plant species. We find that this insect species has experienced rapid northern range expansion, likely due to a combination of the range of its larval host plants and climate changes in winter. This case study shows rapid data collection through large scale community science endeavors can be leveraged through thoughtful data integration and transparent analytic pipelines to inform how environmental change impacts where species are and their interactions for a more cost effective method of biodiversity benchmarking.

Phenology dictates the impact of climate change on geographic distributions of six co‐occurring North American grasshoppers

“…Importantly, no species here showed a range collapse; all grasshopper species examined here are predicted to maintain, if not expand, their current range size. This matches predictions of many other insects (Au & Bonebrake, 2019 ; de la Giroday et al, 2012 ; Wilson et al, 2021 ), and suggests that climate change might not directly precipitate the decline in insect abundances.…”

“…Insects, in particular, are rapidly expanding poleward as warming enables them to colonize previously inhospitable areas (Hickling et al, 2006). Such range shifts are best documented in lepidopterans, having been recorded in Europe (Parmesan et al, 1999), Korea (Adhikari et al, 2020), southeast Asia (Au & Bonebrake, 2019), and North America (Wilson et al, 2021), making butterflies and moths the characteristic example of poleward mobility. However, evidence of poleward shifts of other insect species is relatively sparse, documented for a handful of dragonflies, lacewings, spiders, and grasshoppers (Hickling et al, 2006), and for a few economically important agricultural pests, such as the Colorado potato beetle (Wang et al, 2017) or mountain pine beetle (de la Giroday et al, 2012).…”

Expanding insect pollinators in the Anthropocene

“…An index assessing the level at which nitrogen‐rich habitats can impact butterflies has been developed and could be used to forecast which species could benefit from anthropogenic habitats (WallisDeVries & van Swaay, 2017 ). Away from agriculture, climate‐driven expansion of key host plants partly explains the dramatic northern expansion of the specialist giant swallowtail butterfly ( Papilio cresphontes ) by 180 km per decade in North America, an expansion that is also associated with warmer, wetter climate conditions in both overwintering and active flight stages of this pollinator (Wilson et al ., 2021 ).…”

Combining community science and taxonomist expertise for large‐scale monitoring of insect pollinators: Perspective and insights from Abeilles citoyennes

“…While birds and butterflies dominate as study groups in CS (Basile et al, 2021; Devictor et al, 2010; Dickinson et al, 2010; Flockhart et al, 2019; Government of Canada, 2023; Prudic et al, 2017), a number of CS projects have recently been launched to document the distribution of bumblebees (Beckham & Atkinson, 2017; Lye et al, 2012; MacPhail, Gibson, Hatfield, et al, 2020; Suzuki‐Ohno et al, 2017) or the abundance (Ganzevoort & van den Born, 2021) or assemblages of other wild bee species (Le Féon et al, 2016; Mason & Arathi, 2019) from data collected by targeted groups of trained citizens in schools or public and private gardens. In recent years, CS data have been used successfully to track changes in insect populations (Forister et al, 2021; Soroye et al, 2020; Wilson et al, 2021) and represent a promising avenue for assessing population trends in insect pollinators.…”