Abstract
How climate affects species distributions is a longstanding question receiving renewed interest owing to the need to predict the impacts of global warming on biodiversity. Is climate change forcing species to live near their critical thermal limits? Are these limits likely to change through natural selection? These and other important questions can be addressed with models relating geographical distributions of species with climate data, but inferences made with these models are highly contingent on non-climatic factors such as biotic interactions. Improved understanding of climate change effects on species will require extensive analysis of thermal physiological traits, but such data are both scarce and scattered. To overcome current limitations, we created the GlobTherm database. The database contains experimentally derived species’ thermal tolerance data currently comprising over 2,000 species of terrestrial, freshwater, intertidal and marine multicellular algae, plants, fungi, and animals. The GlobTherm database will be maintained and curated by iDiv with the aim to keep expanding it, and enable further investigations on the effects of climate on the distribution of life on Earth.
Highlights
Background & SummaryA long-standing challenge in ecology and biogeography is to understand what generates patterns in species diversity and distributions[1]
The upper and lower temperature limits to performances, sublethal irreversible conditions and molecular degradation are central to determining the geographic distributions and range shifts of species under climate change[3]
Thermal tolerances limits can be used to evaluate the relative contribution of macrophysiology and macroevolution to generating species diversity gradients in terrestrial, coastal, and marine realms[4]
Summary
A long-standing challenge in ecology and biogeography is to understand what generates patterns in species diversity and distributions[1]. Studies using experimentally-derived estimates of species’ fundamental climatic niches have significantly advanced our knowledge of how species’ ranges conform to thermal tolerance limits at land and sea[7,8] and how thermal physiological traits are asymmetrically conserved through evolution[9]. These studies have generally been limited in taxonomic coverage, with only one study focused on trans-realm comparisons[7]. GlobTherm is unique in collating experimentally-derived thermal tolerance data, which are independent-and comparable-to species’ realized ranges
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