Habitat availability explains variation in climate-driven range shifts across multiple taxonomic groups

Philip J Platts,Gary D Powney,Tom H Oliver,Chris D Thomas,Jane K Hill,Richard Fox,Georgina Palmer,Suzanna C Mason

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-51582-2

Philip J Platts, Gary D Powney + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51582-2

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Abstract

Range shifting is vital for species persistence, but there is little consensus on why individual species vary so greatly in the rates at which their ranges have shifted in response to recent climate warming. Here, using 40 years of distribution data for 291 species from 13 invertebrate taxa in Britain, we show that interactions between habitat availability and exposure to climate change at the range margins explain up to half of the variation in rates of range shift. Habitat generalists expanded faster than more specialised species, but this intrinsic trait explains less of the variation in range shifts than habitat availability, which additionally depends on extrinsic factors that may be rare or widespread at the range margin. Similarly, while climate change likely underlies polewards expansions, we find that more of the between-species variation is explained by differences in habitat availability than by changes in climatic suitability. A model that includes both habitat and climate, and their statistical interaction, explains the most variation in range shifts. We conclude that climate-change vulnerability assessments should focus as much on future habitat availability as on climate sensitivity and exposure, with the expectation that habitat restoration and protection will substantially improve species’ abilities to respond to uncertain future climates.

Highlights

Many species are shifting their distributions polewards and to higher elevations in response to climate warming[1,2,3], but there is extremely large variation in the rates at which the range boundaries of individual species are moving[4,5,6,7,8]
We found that while exposure to climate change is positively associated with rates of range shift (Satterthwaite’s t-test: P = 0.00048, n = 291 species), this explains less variation than habitat availability (R2m = 4% and R2c = 4%, increasing to R2m = 16% and R2c = 19% for the most reliably-recorded groups; Table S6)
Our analysis confirms that range-margin dynamics vary greatly among species, and finds that up to a quarter of this variation can be explained independently of species-level differences in exposure to climate change, by the interplay between species’ habitat associations and the landscapes they encounter during range expansion

Summary

Introduction

Many species are shifting their distributions polewards and to higher elevations in response to climate warming[1,2,3], but there is extremely large variation in the rates at which the range boundaries of individual species are moving[4,5,6,7,8]. It remains useful to compare the habitat breadth (specialisation to generalisation) of a set of species across a range of recognised vegetation types, and www.nature.com/scientificreports compare habitat availability at species’ range margins with observed rates of range shift. This approach allows a wide range of species to be considered, in Britain which has some of the largest datasets of species occurrence records in the world. Using 25 million hectare-resolution occurrence records for invertebrate species in mainland Britain, we show that habitat-climate interactions in species’ range margins explain up to half of the observed variation in rates of range shift across 291 species in 13 taxonomic groups (aquatic bugs, bees, butterflies, dragonflies and damselflies, grasshoppers and allies, ground beetles, hoverflies, macromoths, non-marine molluscs, shieldbugs and allies, soldierflies and allies, spiders, and wasps; Table S1)

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