Strong influence of palaeoclimate on the structure of modern African mammal communities

Abstract

Ecological research often assumes that species are adapted to their current climatic environments. However, climate fluctuations over geologic timescales have influenced species dispersal and extinction, which in turn may affect community structure. Modern community structure is likely to be the product of both palaeoclimate and modern climate, with the relative degrees of influence of past and present climates unknown. Here, we assessed the influence of climate at different time periods on the phylogenetic and functional trait structure of 203 African mammal communities. We found that the climate of the mid-Holocene (approx. 6000 years ago) and Last Glacial Maximum (approx. 22 000 years ago) were frequently better predictors of community structure than modern climate for mammals overall, carnivorans and ungulates. Primate communities were more strongly influenced by modern climate than palaeoclimate. Overall, community structure of African mammals appears to be related to the ecological flexibility of the groups considered here and the regions of continental Africa that they occupy. Our results indicate that the future redistribution, expansion and contraction of particular biomes due to human activity, such as climate and land-use change, will differentially affect mammal groups that vary in their sensitivity to environmental change.

Anthropogenic threats can have cascading homogenizing effects on the phylogenetic and functional diversity of tropical ecosystems

“…Indeed, we find that changes in the composition of primate communities track changes in angiosperm community composition and phylogenetic turnover especially well. Primate communities have been shown to be influenced by temporal changes in climate (and by proxy, vegetation) more closely than other mammals in Africa (Rowan et al 2016), and the diversification of primate clades has been attributed to primates' mutualistic interactions with plant taxa (Gómez and Verdú 2012). This is also supported by the fact that we find positive correlations between the phylogenetic clustering (SES.MPD) of plant communities and mammal communities.…”

Biotic interchange has structured Western Hemisphere mammal communities

“…Recent studies suggest that knowledge of the past is required to understand the assembly of modern communities (Cardillo, 2011;Fraser et al, 2014Fraser et al, , 2015Maguire, Nieto-Lugilde, Fitzpatrick, Williams, & Blois, 2015;Rowan et al, 2016) and that patterns of extinction and speciation alone can lead to changes in phylogenetic community structure (Fraser et al, 2015). Inclusion of extinct species in these types of analyses would be likely to illuminate the contribution of differences in historical rates of speciation and extinction, which cannot be estimated accurately from extant-only phylogenies, to differences in community structure among the tropical and temperate zones.…”

“…Furthermore, body mass is collinear with many of the additional traits (e.g., diet) included in the calculation of functional diversity (Pineda‐Munoz, Evans, & Alroy, ). As a result, studies that include additional functional variables, such as broad dietary category (e.g., herbivore or carnivore), do not yield spatial patterns of functional diversity different from those expected for body mass dispersion alone (e.g., functional clustering in the tropics; Mazel et al, ; Oliveira et al, ; Safi et al, ), suggesting that body mass does capture the major axes of niche variation (Rowan, Kamilar, Beaudrot, & Reed, ). Body mass is also a highly heritable trait among mammals (Smith et al, ) and therefore shows significant phylogenetic signal (Figure a).…”

Unravelling the history of biodiversity in mountain ranges through integrating geology and biogeography

“…Kessler, Herzog, Fjeldså, & Bach, 2001;McCain, 2009;Antonelli et al, 2018), thereby not accounting for potential time-lags in different biotic responses such as extinction and niche evolution (e.g. Ivory, Early, Sax, & Russell, 2016;Rowan, Kamilar, Beaudrot, & Reed, 2016;Svenning, Eiserhardt, Normand, Ordonez, & Sandel, 2015). Further disconnect between temporal and spatial patterns of biodiversity arises as the spatial dynamics of biodiversity are not solely constrained by physical environment, but also driven by biotic interactions and dispersal ability (Fortelius et al, 2014;Jablonski, Huang, Roy, & Valentine, 2017;Linder, Lehmann, Archibald, Osborne, & Richardson, 2018).…”