The impact of anthropogenic disturbance and climate change on the distribution of Dekay’s brown snake (Storeria dekayi)

Abstract

Human activities in the Anthropocene contribute to natural resource and climatic pattern shifts, which in turn affect the distributions of organisms. Currently, research efforts to understand organismal distribution patterns mainly focus on rare species, leaving common taxa to receive less attention. We constructed ecological niche models using MaxEnt to evaluate the distributions of a common urban reptile, Dekay’s brown snake (Storeria dekayi). We investigate the importance of human disturbance for the current S. dekayi distribution, the niche differentiation of the two genetic lineages of S. dekayi separated by the Mississippi River, and the potential future range shift of S. dekayi. We found no significant effect of human disturbance on current S. dekayi distribution. There was no significant evidence of niche differentiation between two lineages (eastern and western), which can possibly be attributed to their shallow genetic divergence. We also predicted a range expansion for S. dekayi in the future with anthropogenic climate change. Understanding the distribution patterns of common species is important because of the pivotal role they play in ecosystem functioning and services. We encourage more work to be conducted in the future on common and urban-dwelling species’ distributions to conserve and promote urban biodiversity and biodiversity overall.