Coupling of palaeontological and neontological reef coral data improves forecasts of biodiversity responses under global climatic change.

ABSTRACT: Reef corals are currently undergoing climatically driven poleward range expansions, with some evidence for equatorial range retractions. Predicting their response to future climate scenarios is critical to their conservation, but ecological models are based only on short-term observations. The fossil record provides the only empirical evidence for the long-term response of organisms under perturbed climate states. The palaeontological record from the Last Interglacial (LIG; 125 000 years ago), a time of global warming, suggests that reef corals experienced poleward range shifts and an equatorial decline relative to their modern distribution. However, this record is spatio-temporally biased, and existing methods cannot account for data absence. Here, we use ecological niche modelling to est

SUBMITTER: Jones LA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6502368 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature