The role of growing degree-days in explaining moth species distributions at broad scales
Data files
Apr 23, 2024 version files 9.64 KB
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quality_test.csv
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README.md
Abstract
Growing degree-days (GDD), an estimate of an organism’s growing season length, has been shown to be an important predictor of Lepidopteran species’ distributions and could be influencing Lepidopteran range shifts to climate change. Yet, one understudied simplification in this literature is that the same thermal threshold is used in the calculations of GDD for all species instead of a species-specific threshold. By characterizing the phenological process influenced by climate, a species-specific estimate of GDD should improve the accuracy of species distribution models (SDMs). To test this hypothesis, we use published lab-estimated thermal thresholds and modeled the current geographic distribution of 30 moth species native to North America. We found that the predictive performance of models based on a species-specific estimate of GDD was indistinguishable from models based on a standard estimate of GDD. This is likely because GDD was not an important predictor of these species’ distributions. Our findings suggest that lab-estimated thermal thresholds may not always scale up to be predictive at broad scales and that more work is needed to leverage the data from lab experiments into SDMs to accurately predict species’ range shifts in response to climate change.
README: The role of growing degree-days in explaining moth species distributions at broad scales
Data used to generate the species' BDT and assess how the quality of the experiments may have influenced the accuracy of BDT.
Description of the Data and file structure
quality_test.csv: data used to assess the quality of the experiment that generated the base development temperature for the 30 species used in the analysis
Column names, Definition, Units
BDT: Base development temperature estimate from the experiment; in degrees Celsius
ltm: lowest temperature treatment included in the experiment, stages included; in degrees Celsius
adj_ltm: adjusted lowest temperature treatment included in the experiment if more than one ltm was provided; took the mean if the ltm was different for different life stages; in degrees Celsius
ltd: lowest temperature with data on developmental rate (i.e., mortality or no development detected at temperature treatments lower than this, if different from lowest temperature measured), stages included; in degrees Celsius
adj_ltd: adjusted lowest temperature with data on developmental rate; took the mean if the ltd was different for different life stages; in degrees Celcius
ntm: number of temperature treatments, stages and other notes included
adj_ntm: adjusted number of temperature treatments if more than one ntm was provided; only including constant temperature treatments; took the mean if the ntm was different for different life stages
ls: number of life stages that developmental rate was measured
lab_experiment: indication of whether the experiment took place in the lab; 1 = lab experiment; 0 = not a lab experiment
field_experiment: indication of whether the experiment took place in the field; 1 = field experiment; 0 = not a field experiment
notes: additional notes
author - link: Reference information for the study
Sharing/access Information
Data was derived from:
Jarok, V., Honk, A., Magarey, R. D., & Skuhrovec, J. (2011). Developmental database for phenology models: Related insect and mite species have similar thermal requirements. Journal of Economic Entomology, 104(6), 18701876. https://doi.org/10.1603/EC11247