Heat freezes niche evolution.

By Miguel B. Araújo, F. Ferri‐Yáñez, Francisco Bozinovic, Pablo A. Marquet, F. Valladares, Steven L. Chown. Ecology Letters, 2013

825 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Climate change is altering phenology and distributions of many species and further changes are projected. Can species physiologically adapt to climate warming? We analyse thermal tolerances of a large number of terrestrial ectotherm (n = 697), endotherm (n = 227) and plant (n = 1816) species worldwide, and show that tolerance to heat is largely conserved across lineages, while tolerance to cold varies between and within species. This pattern, previously documented for ectotherms, is apparent for this group and for endotherms and plants, challenging the longstanding view that physiological tolerances of species change continuously across climatic gradients. An alternative view is proposed in which the thermal component of climatic niches would overlap across species more than expected. We argue that hard physiological boundaries exist that constrain evolution of tolerances of terrestrial organisms to high temperatures. In contrast, evolution of tolerances to cold should be more frequent. One consequence of conservatism of upper thermal tolerances is that estimated niches for cold-adapted species will tend to underestimate their upper thermal limits, thereby potentially inflating assessments of risk from climate change. In contrast, species whose climatic preferences are close to their upper thermal limits will unlikely evolve physiological tolerances to increased heat, thereby being predictably more affected by warming.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/043b9ec091f33d442f4734a3d49b5f590d7701e6

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Citations in the corpus

Experimental warming in the field delays phenology and reduces body mass, fat content and survival: Implications for the persistence of a pollinator under climate change (2018, background): “However, O. ribifloris is likely near the limits of its thermal safety margins at our study site, and most terrestrial ectotherms have limited potential to increase their upper thermal tolerance limits (Araújo et al., 2013; Hoffmann et al., 2012).”
Local climatic changes affect biodiversity responses to land use: A review (2019, methodology): “First, the measurement protocols used to calculate thermal tolerances often differ between studies, rendering the metrics produced incomparable (Araújo et al., 2013).”
Limited scope for plasticity to increase upper thermal limits (2016, background): “The fact that varia- tion in upper thermal limits is much lower than for lower thermal limits in many terrestrial ectotherms (Addo- Bediako, Chown & Gaston 2000; Huey et al. 2009; Sun- day, Bates & Dulvy 2011; Kellermann et al. 2012; Araujo et al. 2013; Grigg & Buckley 2013) suggests that the scope ”
Thermal-safety margins and the necessity of thermoregulatory behavior across latitude and elevation (2014, neutral): “Therefore, for reptiles, thermoregulatory behavior has either buffered selection upon heat tolerance (4, 19–21, 29) or compensated for an invariability or “hard upper bound” in heat tolerance (27, 33).”
Where do functional traits come from? The role of theory and models (2019, background): “Various collations of thermal tolerance observations have been made (Araújo et al., 2013; Bennett et al., 2018; Khaliq et al., 2015; Sunday et al., 2011).”
Evolution of Ecological Niche Breadth (2017, background): “Nevertheless, the vulnerability of cold-adapted taxa to increased warming may be inflated (Araújo et al. 2013).”