Environmental variation is a major predictor of global trait turnover in mammals

Holt, Ben G.; Costa, Gabriel C.; Penone, Caterina; Lessard, Jean‐Philippe; Brooks, Thomas M.; Davidson, Ana D.; Radeloff, Volker C.; Rahbek, Carsten; Rondinini, Carlo; Graham, Catherine H.

doi:10.1111/jbi.13091

Cited by 20 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 64 publications

(77 reference statements)

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“…PC2 also generally distinguishes volant species from non-volant species (Supplementary Fig. 5c), not directly through their aerial mode (which was not used as a trait within our PCA), but via ecomorphological differences (reflecting previous results for mammals only 42 ). The strongest correlations across the traits were between body mass and diet (Pearson’s r = −0.45), body mass and generation length ( r = 0.41), and generation length and litter/clutch size ( r = −0.34) (Supplementary Fig.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 73%

Projected losses of global mammal and bird ecological strategies

2019

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Species, and their ecological strategies, are disappearing. Here we use species traits to quantify the current and projected future ecological strategy diversity for 15,484 land mammals and birds. We reveal an ecological strategy surface, structured by life-history (fast–slow) and body mass (small–large) as one major axis, and diet (invertivore–herbivore) and habitat breadth (generalist–specialist) as the other. We also find that of all possible trait combinations, only 9% are currently realized. Based on species’ extinction probabilities, we predict this limited set of viable strategies will shrink further over the next 100 years, shifting the mammal and bird species pool towards small, fast-lived, highly fecund, insect-eating, generalists. In fact, our results show that this projected decline in ecological strategy diversity is much greater than if species were simply lost at random. Thus, halting the disproportionate loss of ecological strategies associated with highly threatened animals represents a key challenge for conservation.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 73%

Projected losses of global mammal and bird ecological strategies

2019

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“…Note that this characterization would also require knowledge about climatic conditions or the use of weather models (Schleuning et al, 2016), as well as knowledge about how individual species respond to those changes. While this task could be challenging, both new theoretical (Amarasekare & Coutinho, 2013;Benadi, Blüthgen, Hovestadt, & Poethke, 2013;Csergö et al, 2017;Holt et al, 2017;Hunter-Cevera et al, 2017;Poisot, Stouffer, & Gravel, 2015) and empirical studies (CaraDonna et al, 2017;Schleuning et al, 2016;Vázquez, Chacoff, & Cagnolo, 2009) are providing a good guideline toward this goal. Overall, the task is to characterize a representative set of potential environmental conditions for a given location rather than an arbitrary set of random external perturbations.…”

Section: A Ple a For An Environment-dependent Fr Ame Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking the importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment‐dependent framework

Cenci

Song

Saavedra

2018

Ecology and Evolution

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A major quest in network and community ecology has been centered on understanding the importance of structural patterns in species interaction networks—the synthesis of who interacts with whom in a given location and time. In the past decades, much effort has been devoted to infer the importance of a particular structure by its capacity to tolerate an external perturbation on its structure or dynamics. Here, we demonstrate that such a perspective leads to inconsistent conclusions. That is, the importance of a network structure changes as a function of the external perturbations acting on a community at any given point in time. Thus, we discuss a research agenda to investigate the relative importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment‐dependent framework. We hypothesize that only by studying systematically the link between network structure and community dynamics under an environment‐dependent framework, we can uncover the limits at which communities can tolerate environmental changes.

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“…As such, we did not capture the effects of Quaternary climate change on current ungulates, Carnivores and Xenarthra. Nonetheless, species belonging to these taxa are still threatened by future climate change and general environmental variation [12,69,70] and more investigation incorporating fossil records from the Quaternary period may be needed in this aspect.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such threat coupled with negative response to past climate change imply a worrisome future for mammals in rapidly changing human-induced climates, especially because extinction is a synergetic process influenced by the interaction of multiple threats [73]. Inclusion of historical records has increased the precision of models predicting future threats [74,75], improves our understanding of extant mammalian trait turnover [70] and may help analyze species vulnerability to future anthropogenic impacts. Thus, fossil record, past climate change and historical range dynamics become important variables to be incorporated into future extinction risk analyses and conservation planning.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historical range contractions can predict extinction risk in extant mammals

et al. 2019

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Climate change is amongst the main threats to biodiversity. Considering extant mammals endured Quaternary climate change, we analyzed the extent to which this past change predicts current mammals’ extinction risk at global and biogeographical scales. We accessed range dynamics by modeling the potential distribution of all extant terrestrial mammals in the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, 21,000 years ago) and in current climate conditions and used extinction risk from IUCN red list. We built General Linear Mixed-Effects Models to test the magnitude with which the variation in geographic range (ΔRange) and a proxy for abundance (ΔSuitability) between the LGM and present-day predicts current mammal’s extinction risk. We found past climate change most strongly reduced the geographical range and climatic suitability of threatened rather than non-threatened mammals. Quaternary range contractions and reduced suitability explain around 40% of species extinction risk, particularly for small-bodied mammals. At global and biogeographical scales, all groups that suffered significant Quaternary range contractions now contain a greater proportion of threatened species when compared to groups whose ranges did not significantly contract. This reinforces the importance of using historical range contractions as a key predictor of extinction risk for species in the present and future climate change scenarios and supports current efforts to fight climate change for biodiversity conservation.

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Environmental variation is a major predictor of global trait turnover in mammals

Cited by 20 publications

References 64 publications

Projected losses of global mammal and bird ecological strategies

Projected losses of global mammal and bird ecological strategies

Rethinking the importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment‐dependent framework

Historical range contractions can predict extinction risk in extant mammals

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