The long-term effects of climate change on biodiversity and biogeographic patterns are uncertain. There are known relationships between geographic area and both the number of species and the number of ecological functional groups—termed the species-area relationship and the functional diversity–area relationship, respectively. We show that there is a positive relationship between the number of species in an area, the number of ecological functional groups, and oceanic temperature in the shallow-marine fossil record of New Zealand over a time span of ~40 million years. One implication of this relationship is that functional redundancy increases with temperature. This reveals a long-lived and persistent association between the spatial structuring of biodiversity, the temperature-dependence of functional redundancy, and shallow-marine biodiversity in mid-latitudes.

气候变化对生物多样性和生物地理格局的长期影响尚不确定。地理区域与物种数量和生态功能群数量之间存在已知的关系——分别称为物种-区域关系和功能多样性-区域关系。我们表明，在大约 4000 万年的时间跨度内，新西兰浅海化石记录中一个地区的物种数量、生态功能群的数量和海洋温度之间存在正相关关系。这种关系的一个含义是功能冗余随温度增加。这揭示了生物多样性的空间结构、功能冗余的温度依赖性、