The roles of aridification and sea level changes in the diversification and persistence of freshwater fish lineages
The process of publishing science is a lengthy one – there are many rounds of revisions, assessments, and review required before a paper can be published. With that, I’m very proud to announce that the first paper from my PhD has recently been published in the journal Molecular Ecology. This paper is a collection of a lot of complex analyses, and addressing some relatively complicated biogeographical questions, so I’ve decided to provide a simplified summary here.
As you may have gathered, The G-CAT has been significantly less active in this our most Cursed year. There are a number of reasons for that – not just the overall disaster that has been world events – including the fact that this was the last year of my PhD. I’m delighted to announce that now, after ~3.5 years of hard work, I am officially Dr. Buckley (not Dr. G-CAT, as I may have led you to believe)!
Typically, the maximum distribution of species is based on their ecological tolerances: that is, the most extreme environments they can tolerate and proliferate within. Of course, there are a huge number of other factors on top of just natural environment which can shape species distributions, particularly related to human-induced environmental changes (or introducing new species as invasive pests, which we seem to be good at). But exactly where species are and why they occur there are intrinsically linked to the adaptive characteristics of species relative to their environment.
The generalised pipeline of SDM, taken from Svenning et al. (2011). By correlating species occurrence data (bottom left) with environmental data (top left), we can develop a model that describes how the species is distributed based on environmental limitations (top right). From here, we can choose to validate the model with other methods (top and bottom centre) or see how the distribution might change with different environmental changes (e.g. bottom right).
A basic how-to on running SDM
The first major component that is needed for SDM is the occurrence data. Some methods will work with presence-only data: that is, a map of GPS coordinates which describes where that species has been found. Others work with presence-absence data, which may require including sites of known non-occurrence. This is an important aspect as the non-occurring sites defines the environment beyond the tolerance threshold of the species: however, it’s very likely that we haven’t sampled every location where they occur, and there will be some GPS co-ordinates that appear to be absent of our species where they actually occur. There are some different analytical techniques which can account for uneven sampling across the real distribution of the species, but they can get very technical.
An example of species (occurrence only) locality data (with >72,000 records) for the koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) across Australia, taken from the Atlas of Living Australia. Carefully checking the locality data is important, as visual inspection clearly shows records where koalas are not native: they might have been recorded from an introduced individual, given incorrect GPS coordinates or incorrectly identified (red circles).
An example of some of the environmental data/maps we might choose to include in a species distribution model, obtained from the Atlas of Living Australia. A) Mean annual temperature. B) Mean annual precipitation. C) Elevation. D) Weighted distance to nearest waterbody (e.g. rivers, lakes, streams).
Our SDM analysis of choice (e.g. MaxEnt) will then use various algorithms to build a model which best correlates where the species occurs with the environmental variables at those sites. The model tries to create a set of environmental conditions that best encapsulate the occurrence sites whilst excluding the non-occurrence sites from the prediction. From the final model, we can evaluate how strong the effect of each of our variables is on the distribution of the species, and also how well our overall model predicts the locality data.
An example of projecting a species distribution model back in time (in this case, to the Last Glacial Maximum 21,000 years ago), taken from Pelletier et al. (2016). On the left is the contemporary distribution of each species; on the right the historic projection. The study focused on three different species of American salamanders and how they had evolved and responded to historic climate change. This figure clearly shows how the distribution of the species have changed over time, particularly how the top two species have significantly reduced in distribution in modern times.
Species distribution modelling continues to be a useful tool for conservation and evolution studies, and improvements in analytical algorithms, available environmental data and increased sampling of species will similarly improve SDM. Particularly, improvements in environmental projections from both the distant past and future will improve our ability to understand and predict how species will change, and have changed, with climatic changes
