Climatic niche shift in the amphitropical disjunct grass Trichloris crinita.

R Emiliano Quiroga,Luciano Bosso,Andrea C Premoli,Roberto J Fernández

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0199811

Abstract

Plant species disjunctions have attracted the interest of ecologists for decades. We investigated Trichloris crinita, a native C4 perennial grass with disjunct distribution between subtropical regions of North and South America, testing the hypothesis that the species has a similar realized climatic niche in both subcontinents. The climatic niche of T. crinita in North and South America was characterized and compared using presence records and five uncorrelated bioclimatic variables selected according to their ecological importance for the species. We used reciprocal modeling to make geographic projections of the realized niche within each subcontinent. Niche overlap between T. crinita distributions in North and South America was intermediate for the individual climatic variables and the multivariate space. In all cases the test of equivalence between climates inhabited by T. crinita indicated that the realized niche of the species differ significantly between subcontinents. Also, the similarity test showed that in the majority of cases the realized niche in both subcontinents was significantly different than that expected by chance. T. crinita occupied a greater diversity of environments in South than in North America, while in the latter its distribution was displaced to drier and warmer environments. The modeled geographic distribution using the actual occurrences of the species in North America did not accurately predict the distribution in South America, and vice versa. Together, these results led us to reject the hypothesis of similar niche of T. crinita in both subcontinents. This information may be useful to manage restoration efforts by presenting the suitable areas and climates for the species, and suggesting that translocation of individuals between subcontinents could only be recommended with caution because introduced genotypes can be potentially maladaptive, and could colonize sites actually not occupied by the species within each subcontinent.

Highlights

Disjunct plant-species distributions have captured the interest of botanists and ecologists for decades [1, 2]
The similarity test indicated that only for two variables in one direction of the test (TAR and mean temperature of the warmest quarter (MTWQ) when comparing randomly simulated niches in South America to the realized niche in North America) the observed niche overlap was higher than expected by chance (P
The most notable difference between subcontinents was that in South America the species occurs in sites with annual mean temperature (AMT) < 10 ̊C, something that does not occur in North America, even though in this subcontinent there is a wide availability of environments with such temperatures, i.e. < 10 ̊C

Summary

Introduction

Disjunct plant-species distributions have captured the interest of botanists and ecologists for decades [1, 2]. An interesting set of cases comprises several disjunctions of species and genera between North America and South America [3, 4], which recently have received a renewed. Niche shift in an amphitropical disjunct grass. Financial support was provided by grants from Agencia de Promocion Cientıfica y Tecnologica PICT 2404 and 1563 (ACP); Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientıficas y Tecnicas CONICET PIP 626 (ACP) and Universidad de Buenos Aires (RJF). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

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