Life on the edge: a new toolbox for population-level climate change vulnerability assessments

Abstract

1. Global change is impacting biodiversity across all habitats on earth. New selection pressures from changing climatic conditions and other anthropogenic activities are creating heterogeneous ecological and evolutionary responses across many species' geographic ranges. Yet we currently lack standardised and reproducible tools to effectively predict the resulting patterns in species vulnerability to declines or range changes. 2. We developed an informatic toolbox that integrates ecological, environmental and genomic data and analyses (environmental dissimilarity, species distribution models, landscape connectivity, neutral and adaptive genetic diversity and genotype-environment associations) to estimate population vulnerability. In our toolbox, functions and data structures are coded in a standardised way so that it is applicable to any species or geographic region where appropriate data are available, for example individual or population sampling and genomic datasets (e.g. RAD-seq, ddRAD-seq, whole genome sequencing data) representing environmental variation across the species geographic range. 3. We apply our toolbox to a georeferenced genomic dataset for the East African spiny reed frog (Afrixalus fornasini) to predict population vulnerability, as well as demonstrating that range loss projections based on adaptive variation can be accurately reproduced using data for two European bat species (Myotis escalerai, and M. crypticus). 4. Our framework sets the stage for large scale, multi-species genomic datasets to be leveraged in a novel climate change vulnerability framework to quantify intraspecific differences in genetic diversity, local adaptation, range shifts and population vulnerability based on exposure, sensitivity, and range shift potential.

Hybridization Mediated Range Expansion and Climate Change Resilience in Two Keystone Tree Species of Boreal Forests

“…Hybridization could thus be a main factor in coping with climate change in temperate and boreal forest tree species, as our study suggests in the P.abies / P. obovata species complex. There is a burst of new methodology development aiming at integrating niche modeling and genetic offset prediction in order to better apprehend species response to global change (e.g., Barratt et al, 2023; Y. Chen et al, 2022).…”

Hybridization mediated range expansion and climate change resilience in two keystone tree species of boreal forests

“…Hybridization could thus be a main factor in coping with climate change in temperate and boreal forest tree species, as our study suggests in the P. abies / P. obovata species complex. There is a burst of new methodology development aiming at integrating niche modeling and genetic offset prediction in order to better apprehend species response to global change (e.g., Barratt et al., 2023; Chen et al., 2022). If this clearly represents a step forward, our study also evidenced the need for a more integrative framework to also consider species demography history, population structure, and gene flow.…”

Increasing the evolutionary potential of threatened species - genetic and genomic insights from the common midwife toad (Alytes obstetricans) at its range limits

“…We followed Razgour et al (2019) to optimize our analyses, identifying putatively adaptive SNPs with a standard deviation of >2.5 from the mean RDA loadings. We then used the approach of Barratt et al (2023) to categorise individual samples using only putatively adaptive SNPs as either 'warm', 'cold', or 'intermediate' adapted and 'rough', 'moist', or 'intermediate' adapted based on their position in the RDA ordination space, mapping the proportions of individuals in each adaptive category using the mapPies function of the rworldmap R package (South 2011).…”