Species-specific responses of Late Quaternary megafauna to climate and humans

By E. Lorenzen, D. Nogués-Bravo, Ludovic Antoine Alexandre Orlando, J. Weinstock, Jonas Binladen, K. Marske, A. Ugan, M. Borregaard, M. Gilbert, Rasmus Nielsen and 45 more. Nature, 2011

617 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite decades of research, the roles of climate and humans in driving the dramatic extinctions of large-bodied mammals during the Late Quaternary period remain contentious. Here we use ancient DNA, species distribution models and the human fossil record to elucidate how climate and humans shaped the demographic history of woolly rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, wild horse, reindeer, bison and musk ox. We show that climate has been a major driver of population change over the past 50,000 years. However, each species responds differently to the effects of climatic shifts, habitat redistribution and human encroachment. Although climate change alone can explain the extinction of some species, such as Eurasian musk ox and woolly rhinoceros, a combination of climatic and anthropogenic effects appears to be responsible for the extinction of others, including Eurasian steppe bison and wild horse. We find no genetic signature or any distinctive range dynamics distinguishing extinct from surviving species, emphasizing the challenges associated with predicting future responses of extant mammals to climate and human-mediated habitat change.

Subfields: Anthropology, Ecological Modeling, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b8f3e5672c9bd928dc49b614e647111fe81ea4cb

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Citations in the corpus

Drawbacks to palaeodistribution modelling: the case of South American seasonally dry forests (2013, methodology): “, 2011); (4) previous studies hindcasting species distributions using the SDM approach have shown these climatic variables to be important determinants of species geographical ranges at broad scales (Martı́nez-Meyer et al., 2004; Martı́nez-Meyer & Peterson, 2006; Nogués-Bravo et al., 2008; Varela et”
Population Demography and Genetic Diversity in the Pleistocene Cave Lion (2015, background): “However, in the last couple of decades, the analysis of ancient DNA (aDNA) has been adding valuable information, deciphering ancient population dynamics even in the distant past (Lorenzen et al., 2011).”
Modeling Species and Community Responses to Past, Present, and Future Episodes of Climatic and Ecological Change (2015, positive): “…a particular place and time Niche stability: a species niche space remains similar through ecological or evolutionary time and paleoclimatic data with observations of, for example, species traits, phylogeny, or gene frequencies (e.g., Lorenzen et al. 2012, Fordham et al. 2014, Metcalf et al. 2014).”
Forgotten Grasslands of the South: Natural History and Conservation (2012, neutral): “Isbell, F., V. Calcagno, A. Hector, J. Connolly, W. S. Harpole, P. B. Reich, M. Scherer- Lorenzen et al. 2011.”
Multiple Dimensions of Climate Change and Their Implications for Biodiversity (2014, background): “Exploring climate determinants of centers of rarity for Northern Hemisphere plant, bird, and butterfly species (8), and assessing the role of changes in Late Quaternary climate availability on mammal extinctions (21).”
Late Quaternary reptile extinctions: size matters, insularity dominates (2016, background): “Many studies have focused on contrasting the biological traits between extinct and extant species (e.g. Johnson, 2002; Lorenzen et al., 2011), and body size has often emerged as a key factor.”