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Ecological changes in Miocene mammalian record show impact of prolonged climatic forcing.

ABSTRACT: Geohistorical records reveal the long-term impacts of climate change on ecosystem structure. A 5-myr record of mammalian faunas from floodplain ecosystems of South Asia shows substantial change in species richness and ecological structure in relation to vegetation change as documented by stable isotopes of C and O from paleosols. Between 8.5 and 6.0 Ma, C(4) savannah replaced C(3) forest and woodland. Isotopic historical trends for 27 mammalian herbivore species, in combination with ecomorphological data from teeth, show three patterns of response. Most forest frugivores and browsers maintained their dietary habits and disappeared. Other herbivores altered their dietary habits to include increasing amounts of C(4) plants and persisted for >1 myr during the vegetation transition. The few lineages that persisted through the vegetation transition show isotopic enrichment of delta(13)C values over time. These results are evidence for long-term climatic forcing of vegetation structure and mammalian ecological diversity at the subcontinental scale.

SUBMITTER: Badgley C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2527879 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Ecological changes in Miocene mammalian record show impact of prolonged climatic forcing.

Badgley Catherine C Barry John C JC Morgan Michèle E ME Nelson Sherry V SV Behrensmeyer Anna K AK Cerling Thure E TE Pilbeam David D

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20080818 34

Geohistorical records reveal the long-term impacts of climate change on ecosystem structure. A 5-myr record of mammalian faunas from floodplain ecosystems of South Asia shows substantial change in species richness and ecological structure in relation to vegetation change as documented by stable isotopes of C and O from paleosols. Between 8.5 and 6.0 Ma, C(4) savannah replaced C(3) forest and woodland. Isotopic historical trends for 27 mammalian herbivore species, in combination with ecomorpholog ...[more]

PMID: 18711123

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Project description:BackgroundAlthough increasingly sophisticated environmental measures are being applied to species distributions models, the focus remains on using climatic data to provide estimates of habitat suitability. Climatic tolerance estimates based on expert knowledge are available for a wide range of plants via the USDA PLANTS database. We aim to test how climatic tolerance inferred from plant distribution records relates to tolerance estimated by experts. Further, we use this information to identify circumstances when species distributions are more likely to approximate climatic tolerance.MethodsWe compiled expert knowledge estimates of minimum and maximum precipitation and minimum temperature tolerance for over 1800 conservation plant species from the 'plant characteristics' information in the USDA PLANTS database. We derived climatic tolerance from distribution data downloaded from the Global Biodiversity and Information Facility (GBIF) and corresponding climate from WorldClim. We compared expert-derived climatic tolerance to empirical estimates to find the difference between their inferred climate niches (ΔCN), and tested whether ΔCN was influenced by growth form or range size.ResultsClimate niches calculated from distribution data were significantly broader than expert-based tolerance estimates (Mann-Whitney p values << 0.001). The average plant could tolerate 24 mm lower minimum precipitation, 14 mm higher maximum precipitation, and 7° C lower minimum temperatures based on distribution data relative to expert-based tolerance estimates. Species with larger ranges had greater ΔCN for minimum precipitation and minimum temperature. For maximum precipitation and minimum temperature, forbs and grasses tended to have larger ΔCN while grasses and trees had larger ΔCN for minimum precipitation.ConclusionOur results show that distribution data are consistently broader than USDA PLANTS experts' knowledge and likely provide more robust estimates of climatic tolerance, especially for widespread forbs and grasses. These findings suggest that widely available expert-based climatic tolerance estimates underrepresent species' fundamental niche and likely fail to capture the realized niche.

Dataset Information

Ecological changes in Miocene mammalian record show impact of prolonged climatic forcing.

Publications

Ecological changes in Miocene mammalian record show impact of prolonged climatic forcing.

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