Data from: Meta‐analyzing the likely cross‐species responses to climate change
Data files
Aug 30, 2019 version files 2.99 MB
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phy_consensus.txt
51.13 KB
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README_for_SM1_Metabirds.txt
677 B
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SM1_Metabirds.xls
2.94 MB
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SM2_script_metabirds.R
5.26 KB
Abstract
Ecological Niche Models (ENMs) have different performances in predicting potential geographic distributions. Here we meta-analyzed the likely effects of climate change on the potential geographic distribution of 1205 bird species from the Neotropical region, modeled using eight ENMs and three Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCM). We considered the variability in ENMs performance to estimate a weighted mean difference between potential geographic distributions for baseline and future climates. On average, potential future ranges were projected to be 25.7% to 44.5% smaller than current potential ranges across species. However, we found that 0.2% to 18.3% of the total variance in range shifts occurred “within species” (i.e. owing to the use of different modeling techniques and climate models) and 81.7% to 99.8% remained between species (i.e. it could be explained by ecological correlates). Using meta-analytical techniques akin to regression we also showed that potential range shifts are barely predicted by bird biological traits. We demonstrated that one can combine and reduce species-specific effects with high uncertainty in ENMs and also explore potential causes of climate change effect on species using meta-analytical tools. We also highlight that the search for powerful correlates of climate change-induced range shifts can be a promising line of investigation.