Abstract
Quantifying the spatial distribution of taxa is an important prerequisite for the preservation of biodiversity, and can provide a baseline against which to measure the impacts of climate change. Here we analyse patterns of marine mammal species richness based on predictions of global distributional ranges for 115 species, including all extant pinnipeds and cetaceans. We used an environmental suitability model specifically designed to address the paucity of distributional data for many marine mammal species. We generated richness patterns by overlaying predicted distributions for all species; these were then validated against sightings data from dedicated long-term surveys in the Eastern Tropical Pacific, the Northeast Atlantic and the Southern Ocean. Model outputs correlated well with empirically observed patterns of biodiversity in all three survey regions. Marine mammal richness was predicted to be highest in temperate waters of both hemispheres with distinct hotspots around New Zealand, Japan, Baja California, the Galapagos Islands, the Southeast Pacific, and the Southern Ocean. We then applied our model to explore potential changes in biodiversity under future perturbations of environmental conditions. Forward projections of biodiversity using an intermediate Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) temperature scenario predicted that projected ocean warming and changes in sea ice cover until 2050 may have moderate effects on the spatial patterns of marine mammal richness. Increases in cetacean richness were predicted above 40° latitude in both hemispheres, while decreases in both pinniped and cetacean richness were expected at lower latitudes. Our results show how species distribution models can be applied to explore broad patterns of marine biodiversity worldwide for taxa for which limited distributional data are available.
Highlights
The global distribution of species diversity and richness has been of interest to naturalists for centuries and remains an important research topic in ecology today [1]
Resulting patterns remain to be quantitatively validated and cannot be used directly to investigate shifts in distributions under different environmental conditions, since distributions are based on expert knowledge, rather than predictive models that take into account environmental forcings
We present a complementary modelling approach that combines both types of data to make predictions of large-scale marine mammal species distributions using a relative environmental suitability (RES) model [12]; an environmental niche model developed to deal with the prevailing paucity of data for many marine mammal species [12]
Summary
The global distribution of species diversity and richness has been of interest to naturalists for centuries and remains an important research topic in ecology today [1]. The RES model delineates the environmental tolerances of all species with respect to basic parameters known to determine marine mammal distributions directly or indirectly It does so by combining available data on species occurrence and habitat usage, supplemented by expert knowledge [12]. We superimpose individual species predictions to generate global patterns of species richness, defined as the number of species present in a given area [13], which we subsequently validated using independent survey data Bioclimatic envelope models such as the RES models are based on the relationship between species occurrence and environmental proxies, and have been used to explore possible range shifts of marine and terrestrial species under changing environmental conditions [14,15], results tend to be sensitive to model assumptions and uncertainties [16,17,18]. We apply species-specific RES models to explore the possible consequences of temperature change for the global distribution of marine mammal richness in the near future
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