The role of climate, habitat, and species co‐occurrence as drivers of change in small mammal distributions over the past century

Abstract

Species distribution models are commonly used to predict species responses to climate change. However, their usefulness in conservation planning and policy is controversial because they are difficult to validate across time and space. Here we capitalize on small mammal surveys repeated over a century in Yosemite National Park, USA, to assess accuracy of model predictions. Historical (1900Historical ( -1940 climate, vegetation, and species occurrence data were used to develop single-and multi-species multivariate adaptive regression spline distribution models for three species of chipmunk. Models were projected onto the current environmental surface and then tested against modern field resurveys of each species. We evaluated models both within and between time periods and found that even with the inclusion of biotic predictors, climate alone is the dominant predictor explaining the distribution of the study species within a time period. However, climate was not consistently an adequate predictor of the distributional change observed in all three species across time. For two of the three species, climate alone or climate and vegetation models showed good predictive performance across time. The stability of the distribution from the past to present observed in the third species, however, was not predicted by our modeling approach. Our results demonstrate that correlative distribution models are useful in understanding species' potential responses to environmental change, but also show how changes in species-environment correlations through time can limit the predictive performance of models.

Spatially heterogeneous impact of climate change on small mammals of montane California

“…However, we detected few contractions at lower limits of low-elevation mammals (figure 3), and shifts were significantly more common at their upper limits where potential land-use impacts were less evident. Greater heterogeneity in responses of lowelevation species may reflect stronger biotic influences [25,31], such as interspecific competition [40], seral dynamics of habitats [31] and the spread of invasive species [32]. Indeed, for the Central region, low-elevation species tracked changes in the extent of preferred habitats more closely than high-elevation taxa [46].…”

Rescuing and Sharing Historical Vegetation Data for Ecological Analysis: The California Vegetation Type Mapping Project

“…None Thorne et al 2004;Thorne et al 2008;Rubidge et al 2011;Thorne et al 2013;Santos et al 2014a;Santos et al 2014b; None Figure 1). …”

“…However, a small but growing number of studies have utilized VTM data to understand the impact of long-term vegetation changes on animal distributions. Rubidge et al (2011) highlighted the promise of using VTM maps with historical and resurveyed Grinnell Resurvey Project transects 3 to investigate drivers of change in alpine chipmunk (Tamias alpinus) distributions. The detailed descriptions found on the VTM maps allowed vegetation polygons to be matched to California 3 http://mvz.berkeley.edu/Grinnell/index.html.…”

Predicting fish species richness and assemblages with climatic, geographic and morphometric factors: A broad-scale study in Chinese lakes

“…However, thermal ranges exceeding the normal range will impact fish populations and distributions (Gislason et al, 2010;Gale et al, 2013). Extremely low temperatures may affect metabolism, breeding, growth, behavior, and thereby fish distributions (Rubidge et al, 2011;Yu et al, 2013;Aguilar-Kirigin and Naya, 2013). While the maximum temperature may influence fish communities due to the biochemical kinetics change in generating biodiversity (Allen et al, 2002;Brucet et al, 2013).…”