Key Laboratory of Vegetation Restoration and Management of Degraded Ecosystems, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Applied Botany, South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China.
Center for Plant Ecology, Core Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China.
Nat Ecol Evol. 2020 May;4(5):753-763. doi: 10.1038/s41559-020-1158-x. Epub 2020 Mar 23.
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 is 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 (2,087 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.
气候小生境对于确定物种的存在位置以及它们对气候变化的响应方式至关重要。然而，目前尚不清楚植物和动物的气候小生境进化是否相似，或者是否存在内在差异。例如，先前的作者提出，植物比动物具有更广泛的环境耐受性，但对气候变化更为敏感。在这里，我们使用了 19 个植物类群和 17 个脊椎动物类群的系统发育和气候数据（共 2087 个物种），检验了植物和动物中气候小生境进化的十个预测。令人惊讶的是，我们发现对于所有十个预测，植物和动物都表现出相似的模式。例如，在两组中，气候小生境以相似的平均速率发生变化，物种具有相似的平均生态位宽度，并且生态位宽度在两组之间与纬度具有相似的关系。我们的研究结果表明，尽管植物和动物在生物学上存在根本差异，但仍存在跨越植物和动物的一般“规则”的气候小生境进化。这些结果可能有助于解释为什么植物和动物对气候变化的响应相似，以及为什么它们经常具有相似的物种丰富度模式、生物地理区域、生物群落和生物多样性热点。
