Department of Botany, University of Innsbruck, Sternwartestraße 15, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria.
Department of Ecology, University of Innsbruck, Technikerstraße 25, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria.
Nat Commun. 2022 Apr 8;13(1):1921. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-29267-8.
Quaternary climatic oscillations had a large impact on European biogeography. Alternation of cold and warm stages caused recurrent glaciations, massive vegetation shifts, and large-scale range alterations in many species. The Eurasian steppe biome and its grasslands are a noteworthy example; they underwent climate-driven, large-scale contractions during warm stages and expansions during cold stages. Here, we evaluate the impact of these range alterations on the late Quaternary demography of several phylogenetically distant plant and insect species, typical of the Eurasian steppes. We compare three explicit demographic hypotheses by applying an approach combining convolutional neural networks with approximate Bayesian computation. We identified congruent demographic responses of cold stage expansion and warm stage contraction across all species, but also species-specific effects. The demographic history of the Eurasian steppe biota reflects major paleoecological turning points in the late Quaternary and emphasizes the role of climate as a driving force underlying patterns of genetic variance on the biome level.
四次气候振荡对欧洲生物地理学有重大影响。冷暖阶段的交替导致了反复的冰川作用、大规模的植被迁移和许多物种的大规模范围变化。欧亚草原生物群系及其草原就是一个值得注意的例子；它们在温暖阶段经历了气候驱动的大规模收缩，而在寒冷阶段则经历了大规模扩张。在这里，我们评估了这些范围变化对几个在欧亚草原中具有代表性的、亲缘关系较远的植物和昆虫物种的晚第四纪种群动态的影响。我们通过应用一种结合卷积神经网络和近似贝叶斯计算的方法来比较三个明确的种群动态假说。我们发现，所有物种的冷期扩张和暖期收缩都有一致的种群动态响应，但也有物种特异性的影响。欧亚草原生物群的种群历史反映了晚第四纪的主要古生态转折点，并强调了气候作为在生物群系水平上遗传方差模式的驱动力的作用。
