Abstract
BackgroundThe glacial-interglacial cycles in the Pleistocene caused repeated range expansion and contraction of species in several regions in the world. However, it remains uncertain whether such climate oscillations had similar impact on East Asian biota, despite its widely recognized importance in global biodiversity. Here we use both molecular and ecological niche profiles on 11 East Asian avian species with various elevational ranges to reveal their response to the late Pleistocene climate changes.ResultsThe ecological niche models (ENM) consistently showed that these avian species might substantially contract their ranges to the south during the Last Interglacial period (LIG) and expanded their northern range margins through the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), leading to the LGM ranges observed for all 11 species. Consistently, coalescent simulations based on 25–30 nuclear genes retrieved signatures of significant population growth through the last glacial period across all species studied. Climate statistics suggested that high climatic variability during the LIG and a relatively mild climate at the LGM potentially explained the historical population dynamics of these birds.ConclusionsThis is the first study based on multiple species and both lines of ecological niche profiles and genetic data to characterize the unique response of East Asian biota to late Pleistocene climate. The present study highlights regional differences in the evolutionary consequence of climate change during the last glacial cycle and implies that global warming might pose a great risk to species in this region given potentially higher climatic variation in the future analogous to that during the LIG.
Highlights
The glacial-interglacial cycles in the Pleistocene caused repeated range expansion and contraction of species in several regions in the world
With high AUC scores (0.924–0.975, see details in Additional file 1: Table S3), the ecological niche modeling (ENM) analyses for all species clearly showed that the hindcasted area of suitable habitats for the 11 birds at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) were similar to those of the present day, whereas each species contracted its range southward to low-latitude areas at the Last Interglacial period (LIG) but with three different patterns (Fig. 1 and Additional file 4: Figure S1)
That is, (1) the highland specialists contracted to the southern Heng-Duan Mountains in southwest China, (2) the lowland specialists retreated to coastal regions of southeast China and (3) the elevational generalists tended to survive at both of the two regions
Summary
The glacial-interglacial cycles in the Pleistocene caused repeated range expansion and contraction of species in several regions in the world It remains uncertain whether such climate oscillations had similar impact on East Asian biota, despite its widely recognized importance in global biodiversity. It was hypothesized that Pleistocene glaciations might have had a minor impact on East Asian organisms [26] Such discrepancies may have been caused by limitations in study design, for example, with low power to detect population decline (e.g. bottleneck) based on limited number of loci [27], such as a single maternally inherited locus (e.g. mitochondrial or chloroplast DNA) [16, 28] or few, if any, nuclear genes [17, 26]. Analyses based on multiple species and multiple loci are required to robustly test for demographic dynamics of biota in this region [29]
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