Local temperature and ecological similarity drive distributional dynamics of tropical mammals worldwide

Abstract

Aim Identifying the underlying drivers of species’ distributional dynamics is critical for predicting change and managing biological diversity. While anthropogenic factors such as climate change can affect species distributions through time, other naturally occurring ecological processes can also have an influence. Theory predicts that interactions between species can influence distributional dynamics, yet empirical evidence remains sparse. A powerful approach is to monitor and model local colonization and extinction—the processes that generate change in distributions over time—and to identify their abiotic and biotic associations. Intensive camera‐trap monitoring provides an opportunity to assess the role of temperature and species interactions in the colonization and extinction dynamics of tropical mammals, many of which are species of conservation concern. Using data from a pan‐tropical monitoring network, we examined how short‐term local temperature change and ecological similarity between species (a proxy for the strength of species interactions) influenced the processes that drive distributional shifts. Location Tropical forests worldwide. Time period 2007–2016. Major taxa studied Terrestrial mammals. Methods We used dynamic occupancy models to assess the influence of the abiotic and biotic environment on the distributional dynamics of 42 mammal populations from 36 species on 7 tropical elevation gradients around the world. Results Overall, temperature, ecological similarity, or both, were linked to colonization or extinction dynamics in 29 populations. For six species, the effect of temperature depended upon the local mammal community similarity. This result suggests that the way in which temperature influences local colonization and extinction dynamics depends on local mammal community composition. Main conclusions These results indicate that varying temperatures influence tropical mammal distributions in surprising ways and suggest that interactions between species mediate distributional dynamics.

Does trait‐based joint species distribution modelling reveal the signature of competition in stream macroinvertebrate communities?

“…Recently, the growing interest in biotic interactions has led to a myriad of different statistical methods to study whether species are found together less often (negative association in occupancy; segregation) or more often (positive association in occupancy; aggregation) than predicted by random chance only (see Dormann et al, 2018 for an overview). These techniques include single species distribution and dynamic occupancy models in which other species' occupancy (Heikkinen et al, 2007), phylogenetic relationships (Morales-Castilla et al, 2017) and/or ecological similarity (Beaudrot et al, 2019) are included as covariates. Other examples include partial correlation networks (García-Girón et al, 2020), and different ordination methods, such as distance-based redundancy analysis (Bottin et al, 2016).…”

“…If ecologically and functionally similar species with similar habitat preferences are negatively associated, this can be interpreted as a result of interspecific competition (Kohli et al, 2018;Mönkkönen et al, 2017). Indeed, the notion that ecologically similar species should compete more intensively than ecologically dissimilar species is not new (Darwin, 1859), and ecological similarity has been used as a proxy for the probability that species compete with one another (Beaudrot et al, 2019).…”

Are tree plantations promoting homogenization of mammal assemblages between regions with contrasting environments?

“…Latitudinal or longitudinal gradients of climatic factors can also influence the distribution and persistence of some species at a regional scale (e.g. due to physiological restrictions in extreme temperatures; Beaudrot et al, 2019). However, these processes are not mutually exclusive leading to a whole range of responses to land-use changes that affect community similarity (Dormann et al, 2007;Newbold et al, 2016).…”

Functional diversity and redundancy of tropical forest mammals over time

“…Over 50% of the park's border is classified as fragmented landscape (Ahumada et al., 2011). Nevertheless, little forest cover change has been observed within the protected area in recent years (Beaudrot et al., 2019), which suggests that human disturbance from illegal logging has been minimal.…”