Butterfly Species Richness Patterns in Canada: Energy, Heterogeneity, and the Potential Consequences of Climate Change

By Jeremy T. Kerr. 2001

106 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The distributions of most pollinator species are poorly documented despite their importance in providing ecosystem services. While these and other organisms are threatened by many aspects of the human enterprise, anthropogenic climate change is potentially the most severe threat to pollinator biodiversity. Mounting evidence demonstrates that there have already been biotic responses to the relatively small climate changes that have occurred this century. These include wholesale shifts of relatively well-documented butterfly and bird species in Europe and North America. Although studies of such phenomena are supported by circumstantial evidence, their findings are also consistent with predictions derived from current models of spatial patterns of species richness. Using new GIS methods that are highly precise and accurate, I document spatial patterns of Canadian butterfly diversity. These are strongly related to contemporary climate and particularly to potential evapotranspiration. An even more noteworthy finding is the fact that, for the first time, habitat heterogeneity, measured as the number of land cover types in each study unit, is proven to be an equally strong predictor of butterfly richness in a region where energy alone was thought to be the best predictor of diversity. Although previous studies reveal similar relationships between energy and diversity, they fail to detect the powerful link between richness and habitat heterogeneity. The butterflies of Canada provide a superb baseline for studying the effects of climate on contemporary patterns of species richness and comprise the only complete pollinator taxon for which this sort of analysis is currently possible.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/83d16f540d255f006f9dd1d9e1ccef91bf169a15

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Citations in the corpus

Predicting the future of species diversity: macroecological theory, climate change, and direct tests of alternative forecasting methods (2009, background): “A. C. Algar, H. M. Kharouba, E. R. Young and J. T. Kerr (Jeremy.kerr@uottawa.ca), Dept of Biology, Univ. of Ottawa, 30 Marie Curie, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada.”
Energy, water and large-scale patterns of reptile and amphibian species richness in Europe (2005, methodology): “Following Kerr (2001) and Kerr et al. (2001), land-cover data were taken by summing land-cover types in each quadrat classified from 8-km resolution global AVHRR data (http://gaia.umiacs. umd.edu:8811/landcover/).”
Analysis of determinants of mammalian species richness in South America using spatial autoregressive models (2004, methodology): “As noted in the introduction, habitat heterogeneity often is represented either by variation in topography or by the number of ecosystems present in a given area (Currie 1991, Kerr and Packer 1997, Kerr 2001, Kerr et al. 2001, Rahbek and Graves 2001).”
Relative influences of current and historical factors on mammal and bird diversity patterns in deglaciated North America (2003, background): “…based on previous analyses of broad-scale richness gradients in this region, which have primarily focused on contemporary effects (Currie & Paquin, 1987; Currie, 1991; Danell et al ., 1996; Kerr et al ., 1998, 2001; Kerr & Packer, 1999; Badgley & Fox, 2000; Kerr, 2001; Hawkins et al . in press b).”
Species richness of marine soft sediments (2002, background): “In terrestrial systems, Wright’s (1983) energy hypothesis has found favour as the primary factor controlling the patterns in species richness of many terrestrial plant and animal taxa (Kerr & Packer 1997, Kerr 2001).”
Water–energy balance and the geographic pattern of species richness of western Palearctic butterflies (2003, methodology): “However, Kerr (2001) showed a strong relationship between butterfly richness and land cover diversity using the AVHRR data at 8-km resolution (i.e. the same index used here), and Kerr et al. (2001) reported that both land cover measures generated similar results.”
Modeled climate change effects on distributions of Canadian butterfly species (2004, background): “The analyses developed herein achieve much-improved spatial resolution in viewing current patterns of species richness than past studies (Kerr 2001) based on the same fauna and same data set.”
Determinants of the biogeographical distribution of butterflies in boreal regions (2006, background): “, 2004), and only sporadically in northern environments (Kerr, 2001).”