Incorporating physiology into species distribution models moderates the projected impact of warming on selected Mediterranean marine species

Inbal Gamliel,Yehezkel Buba,Tamar Guy‐Haim,Demian Willette,Jonathan Belmaker,Tal Garval,Gil Rilov

doi:10.1111/ecog.04423

Abstract

Species distribution models (SDMs) correlate species occurrences with environmental predictors, and can be used to forecast distributions under future climates. SDMs have been criticized for not explicitly including the physiological processes underlying the species response to the environment. Recently, new methods have been suggested to combine SDMs with physiological estimates of performance (physiology‐SDMs). In this study, we compare SDM and physiology‐SDM predictions for select marine species in the Mediterranean Sea, a region subjected to exceptionally rapid climate change. We focused on six species and created physiology‐SDMs that incorporate physiological thermal performance curves from experimental data with species occurrence records. We then contrasted projections of SDMs and physiology‐SDMs under future climate (year 2100) for the entire Mediterranean Sea, and particularly the ‘warm’ trailing edge in the Levant region. Across the Mediterranean, we found cross‐validation model performance to be similar for regular SDMs and physiology‐SDMs. However, we also show that for around half the species the physiology‐SDMs substantially outperform regular SDM in the warm Levant. Moreover, for all species the uncertainty associated with the coefficients estimated from the physiology‐SDMs were much lower than in the regular SDMs. Under future climate, we find that both SDMs and physiology‐SDMs showed similar patterns, with species predicted to shift their distribution north‐west in accordance with warming sea temperatures. However, for the physiology‐SDMs predicted distributional changes are more moderate than those predicted by regular SDMs. We conclude, that while physiology‐SDM predictions generally agree with the regular SDMs, incorporation of the physiological data led to less extreme range shift forecasts. The results suggest that climate‐induced range shifts may be less drastic than previously predicted, and thus most species are unlikely to completely disappear with warming climate. Taken together, the findings emphasize that physiological experimental data can provide valuable supplemental information to predict range shifts of marine species.

Highlights

Global climate change is strongly affecting terrestrial and marine biota, evident in species range shifts and changes in phenology (Parmesan 2006, Elith et al 2010, IPCC 2014, Sunday et al 2015)
Focusing on the physiological response curves, the relative performance of a species at a certain temperature converted to probabilities, we found that most species demonstrated a unimodal response to temperature (Supplementary material Appendix 1 Fig. A1)
Regular Species distribution models (SDMs) predict that by the year 2100, all four of the indigenous species examined will have disappeared from the Levant, the warmest region of the Mediterranean, and shifted their distribution north-west

Summary

Introduction

Global climate change is strongly affecting terrestrial and marine biota, evident in species range shifts and changes in phenology (Parmesan 2006, Elith et al 2010, IPCC 2014, Sunday et al 2015). Species distribution models (SDMs) are being increasingly used to predict distributional responses to changing climate (Guisan and Thuiller 2005, Kearney and Porter 2009). These models typically correlate species occurrence (sometimes including absences) or abundance with environmental predictors (Elith and Leathwick 2009). SDMs have been criticized in that they do not take into account the physiological processes behind species range shifts (Lawler et al 2006, Kearney et al 2010, Thuiller et al 2013). If the fundamental and realized niches diverge, correlative SDMs may be inaccurate in predicting the future distribution of species (Elith et al 2010, Parravicini et al 2015, Rilov et al 2019)

Methods

Results

Conclusion