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Data and code from: Predicting the fundamental thermal niche of ectotherms

Simon, Margaret1; Amarasekare, Priyanga2

Published Mar 04, 2024 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.rxwdbrvfp

Data files

Mar 04, 2024 version files 242.09 KB

Abstract

Climate warming is predicted to increase mean temperatures and thermal extremes on a global scale. Because their body temperature depends on the environmental temperature, ectotherms bear the full brunt of climate warming. Predicting the impact of climate warming on ectotherm diversity and distributions requires a framework that can translate temperature effects on ectotherm life history traits into population- and community-level outcomes. Here we present a mechanistic theoretical framework that can predict the fundamental thermal niche and climate envelope of ectotherm species based on how temperature affects the underlying life history traits. The advantage of this framework is two-fold. First, it can translate temperature effects on the phenotypic traits of individual organisms to population-level patterns observed in nature. Second, it can predict thermal niches and climate envelopes based solely on trait response data and hence completely independently of any population-level information. We find that the temperature at which the intrinsic growth rate is maximized exceeds the temperature at which abundance is maximized under density-dependent growth. As a result, the temperature at which a species will increase the fastest when rare is lower than the temperature at which it will recover from a perturbation the fastest when abundant. We test model predictions using data from a native-invasive interaction to identify the temperatures at which the invader can most easily invade the native's habitat, and the native species is most likely to resist the invader. The framework is sufficiently mechanistic to yield reliable predictions for individual species, and sufficiently broad to apply across a range of ectothermic taxa. This ability to predict the thermal niche before a species encounters a new thermal environment is essential to mitigating some of the major effects of climate change on ectotherm populations around the globe.