Climatic niches are essential in determining where species can occur and how they will respond to climate change. However, it remains unclear if climatic-niche evolution is similar in plants and animals, or intrinsically different. For example, previous authors have proposed that plants have broader environmental tolerances than animals but are more sensitive to climate change. Here we test ten predictions about climatic-niche evolution in plants and animals, using phylogenetic and climatic data for 19 plant clades and 17 vertebrate clades (2087 species total). Surprisingly, we find that for all ten predictions, plants and animals show similar patterns. For example, in both groups, climatic niches change at similar mean rates and species have similar mean niche breadths, and niche breadths show similar relationships with latitude across groups. Our results suggest that there are general ‘rules’ of climatic-niche evolution that span plants and animals, despite the fundamental differences in their biology. These results may help to explain why plants and animals have similar responses to climate change and why they often have shared species richness patterns, biogeographic regions, biomes and biodiversity hotspots. 

The detailed methods are in the main text of the associated article: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1158-x

Dataset S1. Results of PGLS regression between rates of climatic niche evolution and species divergence times

Dataset S2. Results of PGLS regression between rates of climatic niche evolution and latitude for each species

Dataset S3. Comparisions of niche rates between Bio5 and Bio6, and between Bio16 and Bio17 for each clade

Dataset S4. Results of PGLS regression between niche breadths and other variables.

Dateset S5. Details on plant and animal clades analyzed

Dateset S6. Summary of climatic data of each species for the six climatic variables.

Dateset S7. Model selection for climatic niche variables for rate estimation.

Dataset S8. Rates of climatic niche evolution for each species

Dataset S9. Data for six climatic niche breadth variables for each species

Dataset S10. Phylogenetic trees for each of the 17 animal and 19 plant clades, all plants, all animals, and all 2087 species

Dataset S11. R codes used for this study.

Dataset S12. Species localities and climatic raw data for this study.