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Climatic-niche evolution follows similar rules in plants and animals

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 4, pages 753–763 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

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.

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Fig. 1: Support for ten hypotheses about climatic-niche evolution among 19 plant clades and 17 animal clades.
Fig. 2: Rates of climatic-niche evolution in plants and animals (H1).
Fig. 3: Relationships between rates of climatic-niche evolution and species age (H2).
Fig. 4: Comparison of evolutionary rates for maximum and minimum annual temperatures (H4) and wettest- and driest-quarter precipitation (H5).
Fig. 5: Relationships between niche breadths and absolute latitude of each species (H7).
Fig. 6: Relationships between mean within-locality and species-level niche breadths (H8), between temperature and precipitation niche breadths (H9) and between niche breadths and niche position (H10).

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Data availability

Supplementary Datasets 1–12 are available on Dryad (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.wh70rxwjm).

Code availability

All the R codes used in this study are available in Supplementary Dataset 11 on Dryad (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.wh70rxwjm).

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Acknowledgements

We thank the many authors who provided us with their trees and locality data. H.L. acknowledges financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China grant no. 31670411, Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences grant no. 2019339 and State Scholarship Fund of China Scholarship Council grant no. 201804910141. J.J.W. was supported by US National Science Foundation grant no. DEB 1655690.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 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

    Hui Liu & Qing Ye

  2. Center for Plant Ecology, Core Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China

    Hui Liu & Qing Ye

  3. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Hui Liu & John J. Wiens

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  1. Hui Liu
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H.L. and J.J.W. designed the study and wrote the paper. H.L. performed analyses. All authors contributed to revisions.

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Correspondence to John J. Wiens.

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Supplementary Appendices 1 and 2, Tables 1–13 and Figs. 1–6.

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Liu, H., Ye, Q. & Wiens, J.J. Climatic-niche evolution follows similar rules in plants and animals. Nat Ecol Evol 4, 753–763 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1158-x

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