Niche divergence accelerates evolution in Asian endemic Procapra gazelles

Abstract

Ecological niche divergence and adaptation to new environments are thought to play important roles in driving speciation. Whether recently evolved species show evidence for niche divergence or conservation is vital towards understanding the role of ecology in the process of speciation. The genus Procapra is an ancient, monophyletic lineage endemic to Asia that contains three extant species (P. gutturosa, P. przewalskii and P. picticaudata). These species mainly inhabit the Qinghai-Tibetan and Mongolian Plateaus, and today have primarily allopatric distributions. We applied a series of geographic information system–based analyses to test for environmental variation and niche divergence among these three species. We found substantial evidence for niche divergence in species’ bioclimatic preferences, which supports the hypothesis that niche divergence accelerates diversification in Procapra. Our results provide important insight into the evolutionary history of ungulates in Asia and help to elucidate how environmental changes accelerate lineage diversification.

NicheA: creating virtual species and ecological niches in multivariate environmental scenarios

“…Owing to the versatility of NicheA, the software has already been employed in a diversity of studies using virtual and real species, in fields ranging from epidemiology to evolutionary biology. To date, NicheA has been used to facilitate the study of hantavirus ecology in Brazil (de Oliveira et al 2013), the potential for the spread of whitenose syndrome in bats (Escobar et al 2014), species limits in opossums (Tocchio et al 2014), spatial and environmental distribution of bats (Escobar et al 2015a), niche divergence in Asian gazelles (Hu et al 2015), sympatric speciation in butterflies (Rosser et al 2015), effects of niche breath on species survival (Saupe et al 2015), anticipating the global spread of Vibrio cholerae in marine ecosystems (Escobar et al 2015b), and evaluating performance of ecological niche model algorithms under diverse niche scenarios (Qiao et al 2015).…”

Using data from related species to overcome spatial sampling bias and associated limitations in ecological niche modelling

“…For real‐world species, however, Jaccard similarity coefficients cannot be measured, although alternatives exist, including ENMTools (Warren, Glor, & Turelli, ); Gaussian kernels (Broennimann et al., ), appropriate transformations and probability models (Geange, Pledger, Burns, & Shima, ), and Bayesian frameworks (Swanson et al., ). An important caveat, however, to these existing methods is that many of these options can be misleading or uninformative, particularly when speciation is allopatric and/or there is little overlap between the available environments in different species’ ranges (Hu, Jiang, Chen, & Qiao, ; Qiao, Escobar & Peterson ; Warren, Cardillo, Rosauer, & Bolnick, ; Warren et al., ). With that said, if the question at hand is not sensitive to performance of specificity, integrating related species into rare focal species models may improve performance of ENMs even if niche overlap is low (i.e.…”

Niches and radiations: a case study on the Andean sapphire‐vented puffleg Eriocnemis luciani and coppery‐naped puffleg E. sapphiropygia (Aves, Trochilidae)

“…For example, niches can be modeled based on species occupying environmental niches that are similar ('niche similarity' sensu Peterson et al 1999), which is instrumental for testing biogeographic and evolutionary hypotheses, or identical ('niche equivalency' sensu Graham et al 2004), which is useful for testing the transferability of niche models in space and over a relatively short period of time (Hu et al 2016). The interplay between the conservatism and divergence of niches in shaping lineage differentiation is far from completely understood (Pyron and Burbrink 2009, Peterson 2011, Hu et al 2015, despite its relevance for forecasting changes in biodiversity under changing environmental conditions or invasion risks (Hadly et al 2009, Hortal et al 2011, Lavergne et al 2013, Torres et al 2018. The interplay between the conservatism and divergence of niches in shaping lineage differentiation is far from completely understood (Pyron and Burbrink 2009, Peterson 2011, Hu et al 2015, despite its relevance for forecasting changes in biodiversity under changing environmental conditions or invasion risks (Hadly et al 2009, Hortal et al 2011, Lavergne et al 2013, Torres et al 2018.…”

“…Measuring niche divergence among taxa that share ancestry and occur in similar habitats is paramount for macroecologists and evolutionists. The interplay between the conservatism and divergence of niches in shaping lineage differentiation is far from completely understood (Pyron and Burbrink 2009, Peterson 2011, Hu et al 2015, despite its relevance for forecasting changes in biodiversity under changing environmental conditions or invasion risks (Hadly et al 2009, Hortal et al 2011, Lavergne et al 2013, Torres et al 2018. Environmental niche models (hereafter ENMs) are predictions of species distributions in geographic space (hereafter G-space) that use computer algorithms and mathematical representations of the species' known distribution in environmental space (hereafter E-space; Leathwick 2009, Peterson 2011).…”