Climatic niche evolution in turtles is characterized by phylogenetic conservatism for both aquatic and terrestrial species

Abstract

Understanding how the climatic niche of species evolved has been a topic of high interest in current theoretical and applied macroecological studies. However, little is known regarding how species traits might influence climatic niche evolution. Here, we evaluated patterns of climatic niche evolution in turtles (tortoises and freshwater turtles) and whether species habitat (terrestrial or aquatic) influences these patterns. We used phylogenetic, climatic and distribution data for 261 species to estimate their climatic niches. Then, we compared whether niche overlap between sister species was higher than between random species pairs and evaluated whether niche optima and rates varied between aquatic and terrestrial species. Sister species had higher values of niche overlap than random species pairs, suggesting phylogenetic climatic niche conservatism in turtles. The climatic niche evolution of the group followed an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck model with different optimum values for aquatic and terrestrial species, but we did not find consistent evidence of differences in their rates of climatic niche evolution. We conclude that phylogenetic climatic niche conservatism occurs among turtle species. Furthermore, terrestrial and aquatic species occupy different climatic niches but these seem to have evolved at similar evolutionary rates, reinforcing the importance of habitat in understanding species climatic niches and their evolution.

Different elevational environments dictate contrasting patterns of niche evolution in Neotropical Pithecopus treefrog species

“…Even though researchers disagree about whether finding phylogenetic signal indicates niche conservatism, here, as in other studies, we consider that the expected pattern under this signal is sufficient to result in PNC (Harvey & Pagel, 1991;Wiens, 2008;Cooper et al, 2010;Wiens et al, 2010) as it expresses the tendency that closely related species have more similar climate niches than less related ones. Therefore, the best fit of niche character evolution to a BM model corroborated with the observed significance of phylogenetic signal in climatic niches (the phylogenetic signal approach, Rodrigues et al, 2019), indicates PNC across Pithecopus.…”

“…Different patterns would suggest that related species occurring in each clade have different evolutionary regimes, whereas similar patterns would suggest similar evolutionary regimes regarding their niches (Rodrigues et al, 2019). We compared mean niche overlap using ANOVAs.…”

“…Under the whole‐tree approach, fit of different models representing distinct evolutionary scenarios to the observed data can be evaluated in explicit phylogenetic frameworks, ranging from niche evolution independent of species’ relationships to constrained niche evolution consistent with PNC (Münkemüller et al, 2015). These two approaches are complementary and can and should be applied in tandem (Kozak & Wiens, 2010b; Münkemüller et al, 2015; Peixoto et al, 2017; Rodrigues et al, 2019).…”

Climatic shifts drove major contractions in avian latitudinal distributions throughout the Cenozoic

“…Although an important source of uncertainty, evidence supporting conservation of clade tolerances over evolutionary timescales has been reported in a variety of clades (50)(51)(52)(53)(54)(55)(56)(57)(58)(59). It is striking that we were able to use present-day models of clade tolerances to accurately predict paleo-distributions for these clades' stem-group relatives under conditions estimated to have occurred up to ∼56 million years ago, especially in light of the varied ecological habits and geographic distributions of the clades studied (Fig.…”

Understanding the relationship between climatic niches and dispersal through the lens of bat wing morphology

“…Recently, much attention has been given to the evolutionary patterns underlying climatic niches, especially considering their degree of phylogenetic conservatism (Peixoto, Villalobos & Cianciaruso, 2017; Rodrigues et al ., 2018), how they have evolved (Varzinczak et al ., 2019), and whether they affected diversification rates (Velasco et al ., 2016). In this paper, I consider what causes species to differ in their positions along climatic spaces, that is species mean values of occupied climatic conditions.…”