Regularities in species' niches reveal the world's climate regions
- Umeå University, Sweden
Abstract
Climate regions form the basis of many ecological, evolutionary and conservation studies. However, our understanding of climate regions is limited to how they shape vegetation: They do not account for the distribution of animals. Here we develop a network-based framework to identify important climates worldwide based on regularities in realized niches of about 26,000 tetrapods. We show that high-energy climates, including deserts, tropical savannas, and steppes, are consistent across animal- and plant-derived classifications, indicating similar underlying climatic determinants. Conversely, temperate climates differ across all groups, suggesting that these climates allow for idiosyncratic adaptations. Finally, we show how the integration of niche classifications with geographical information enables the detection of climatic transition zones and the signal of geographic and historical processes. Our results identify the climates shaping the distribution of tetrapods and call for caution when using general climate classifications to study the ecology, evolution, or conservation of specific taxa.
Data availability
Data used is freely available in the sources detailed in the Methods section. Data generated in this study is provided as source data associated to Figures 2 and 3.
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The global distribution of tetrapods reveals a need for targeted reptile conservationDryad Digital Repository,10.5061/dryad.83s7k.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Carl Tryggers Stiftelse för Vetenskaplig Forskning
- Joaquín Calatayud
Stiftelsen Olle Engkvist Byggmästare
- Martin Rosvall
Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas
- Magnus Neuman
- Martin Rosvall
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Calatayud et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Regularities in species' niches reveal the world's climate regions
eLife 10:e58397.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.58397
