Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA.
Department of Integrative Biology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.
Glob Chang Biol. 2020 Mar;26(3):1055-1067. doi: 10.1111/gcb.14897. Epub 2019 Dec 2.
The impacts of climate change have re-energized interest in understanding the role of climate in setting species geographic range edges. Despite the strong focus on species' distributions in ecology and evolution, defining a species range edge is theoretically and empirically difficult. The challenge of determining a range edge and its relationship to climate is in part driven by the nested nature of geography and the multidimensionality of climate, which together generate complex patterns of both climate and biotic distributions across landscapes. Because range-limiting processes occur in both geographic and climate space, the relationship between these two spaces plays a critical role in setting range limits. With both conceptual and empirical support, we argue that three factors-climate heterogeneity, collinearity among climate variables, and spatial scale-interact to shape the spatial structure of range edges along climate gradients, and we discuss several ways that these factors influence the stability of species range edges with a changing climate. We demonstrate that geographic and climate edges are often not concordant across species ranges. Furthermore, high climate heterogeneity and low climate collinearity across landscapes increase the spectrum of possible relationships between geographic and climatic space, suggesting that geographic range edges and climatic niche limits correspond less frequently than we may expect. More empirical explorations of how the complexity of real landscapes shapes the ecological and evolutionary processes that determine species range edges will advance the development of range limit theory and its applications to biodiversity conservation in the context of changing climate.
气候变化的影响重新激发了人们对理解气候在确定物种地理分布范围边界方面的作用的兴趣。尽管生态学和进化领域强烈关注物种的分布，但在理论和实证上，定义物种的分布范围边界都具有一定难度。确定分布范围边界及其与气候的关系之所以具有挑战性，部分原因是由于地理的嵌套性质和气候的多维性，这两者共同在景观中产生了复杂的气候和生物分布模式。由于限制物种分布的过程既发生在地理空间中，也发生在气候空间中，因此这两个空间之间的关系在确定分布范围边界方面起着关键作用。我们认为，有三个因素——气候异质性、气候变量之间的共线性以及空间尺度——共同作用，塑造了沿气候梯度的分布范围边界的空间结构，并且我们讨论了这些因素如何通过几种方式影响物种分布范围边界在气候变化下的稳定性。我们证明，在物种的分布范围内，地理边界和气候边界往往不一致。此外，景观中较高的气候异质性和较低的气候共线性增加了地理空间和气候空间之间可能存在的关系的范围，这表明地理分布范围边界和气候生态位限制的对应关系比我们预期的要少。更多地探讨真实景观的复杂性如何塑造决定物种分布范围边界的生态和进化过程，将有助于发展分布范围边界理论，并将其应用于气候变化背景下的生物多样性保护。
