Climatic niche evolution in New World monkeys (Platyrrhini).

Marcio R Pie,Andreas L S Meyer,Andressa Duran,Sebastien Lavergne

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0083684

Marcio R Pie, Andreas L S Meyer + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0083684

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Dec 23, 2013
Citations: 67	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Federal University of Paraná

Abstract

Despite considerable interest in recent years on species distribution modeling and phylogenetic niche conservatism, little is known about the way in which climatic niches change over evolutionary time. This knowledge is of major importance to understand the mechanisms underlying limits of species distributions, as well as to infer how different lineages might be affected by anthropogenic climate change. In this study we investigate the tempo and mode climatic niche evolution in New World monkeys (Platyrrhini). Climatic conditions found throughout the distribution of 140 primate species were investigated using a principal component analysis, which indicated that mean temperature (particularly during the winter) is the most important climatic correlate of platyrrhine geographical distributions, accounting for nearly half of the interspecific variation in climatic niches. The effects of precipitation were associated with the second principal component, particularly with respect to the dry season. When models of trait evolution were fit to scores on each of the principal component axes, significant phylogenetic signal was detected for PC1 scores, but not for PC2 scores. Interestingly, although all platyrrhine families occupied comparable regions of climatic space, some aotid species such as Aotus lemurinus, A. jorgehernandezi, and A. miconax show highly distinctive climatic niches associated with drier conditions (high PC2 scores). This shift might have been made possible by their nocturnal habits, which could serve as an exaptation that allow them to be less constrained by humidity during the night. These results underscore the usefulness of investigating explicitly the tempo and mode of climatic niche evolution and its role in determining species distributions.

Highlights

The advent of comprehensive databases of climatic variables [1] and the increasing availability of GIS tools has led to the proliferation of studies on predicting species geographical ranges based on their environmental tolerance [2,3,4,5,6]
Given the high level of collinearity among bioclimatic variables, we reduced the dimensionality of the original dataset using a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of its covariance matrix
A Principal Components Analysis (PCA) was efficient in summarizing the observed interspecific climatic niches of platyrrhine monkeys, with the first two axes selected using the brokenstick method accounting for 75% of the total variance in the dataset (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

The advent of comprehensive databases of climatic variables [1] and the increasing availability of GIS tools has led to the proliferation of studies on predicting species geographical ranges based on their environmental tolerance [2,3,4,5,6] These studies have been instrumental to understand how geographical distributions are delimited and how they affect overall biogeographical patterns [4], [7,8], with respect to potentially severe anthropogenic climate changes [9,10]. The existence of LLR has been largely overlooked in the literature on phylogenetic niche conservatism, and treating separately different dimensions of climatic niches might lead to a more productive discussion instead of testing for the presence of niche conservatism (e.g. [23])

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