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Climate and topography explain range sizes of terrestrial vertebrates

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 498–502 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Identifying the factors that influence range sizes of species provides important insight into the distribution of biodiversity1, and is crucial for predicting shifts in species ranges in response to climate change2,3,4. Current climate (for example, climate variability and climate extremes)5,6, long-term climate change4, evolutionary age2, topographic heterogeneity, land area3,7 and species traits such as physiological thermal limits8, dispersal ability9, annual fecundity and body size3,10 have been shown to influence range size. Yet, few studies have examined the generality of each of these factors among different taxa, or have simultaneously evaluated the strength of relationships between range size and these factors at a global scale. We quantify contributions of these factors to range sizes of terrestrial vertebrates (mammals, birds and reptiles) at a global scale. We found that large-ranged species experience greater monthly extremes of maximum or minimum temperature within their ranges, or occur in areas with higher long-term climate velocity and lower topographic heterogeneity or lower precipitation seasonality. Flight ability, body mass and continent width are important only for particular taxa. Our results highlight the importance of climate and topographic context in driving range size variation. The results suggest that small-range species may be vulnerable to climate change and should be the focus of conservation efforts.

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Figure 1: Boxplots of range sizes for the terrestrial vertebrates in fine resolution.
Figure 2: Scatter plots between log-transformed range size and four predictors for each taxon in fine resolution.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Meiri and F. Xu for providing data on life-history traits of some species and K. Bartoń for the suggestion about multimodel inference with package MuMIn in R. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation of China (31530088 and 31200416) and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2013FY110300).

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Author notes

  1. Yiming Li and Xianping Li: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Animal Ecology and Conservation Biology, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1 Beichen West Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100101, China

    Yiming Li, Xianping Li, Zetian Liu, Xuan Liu & Shaofei Yan

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 19 Yuquan Road, Shijingshan, Beijing 100049, China

    Xianping Li, Zetian Liu & Shaofei Yan

  3. Department of Bioscience, Section for Ecoinformatics & Biodiversity, Aarhus University, Aarhus 8000 C, Denmark

    Brody Sandel

  4. Center for Massive Data Algorithmics (MADALGO), Aarhus University, Aarhus 8000 C, Denmark

    Brody Sandel

  5. Key Laboratory of Biogeography and Bioresource in Arid Land, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 818, South Beijing Road, Urumqi 830011, China

    David Blank

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  1. Yiming Li
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Contributions

Y.L. and X.Li designed the study; X.Li, D.B., Z.L., X.Liu and S.Y. collected the data; Y.L., B.S. and X.Li developed the method for controlling for sampling effect in climate extremes; X.Li, Y.L. and B.S. analysed the data; Y.L., X.Li and B.S. wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yiming Li.

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Li, Y., Li, X., Sandel, B. et al. Climate and topography explain range sizes of terrestrial vertebrates. Nature Clim Change 6, 498–502 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2895

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