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CLIMATE CHANGE ECOLOGY

Ecoregion shapes the range response

Nature Climate Change volume 9, pages 730–731 (2019)Cite this article

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Within a single species, different populations can show strikingly varied responses to climate – often attributed to genetic differences of geographically separated populations. Now an elegant analysis, weaving together modelling with large-scale empirical data, demonstrates that ecoregion explains spatial variation in climate responses of the American pika.

As the challenge of predicting, managing and mitigating biogeographic responses of species to climate change intensifies, tackling both the inter- and intraspecific heterogeneity in distributional relationships to climate becomes crucial1. Variation in the direction and magnitude of range shifts of species in response to changing climatic conditions has been well documented2. Underlying this complexity in range shifts is the potential for the relationship and relative importance of climate as a determinant of a species distribution to change across space and time3. Within-species variation in climatic responses has been often attributed to differences in genetic lineages across the distribution of a species4. However, populations can also respond to climate in similar ways, exhibiting spatial synchrony or correlated fluctuations across disjunct populations5. Writing in Nature Climate Change, Adam Smith, Erik Beever and colleagues look beyond the potential for local adaptation to shape species–climate relationships and explore spatial divisions within species distributions (genetic structure, ecoregion, elevational bands and physiography) that may best explain intraspecific heterogeneity in such relationships6. Surprisingly, the authors found that the distributional division of ecoregion, not genetic lineages, explained the most spatial heterogeneity in species–climate relationships for the American pika (Ochotona princeps).

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Fig. 1

Ken Hickman

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  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Meagan F. Oldfather

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  1. Meagan F. Oldfather
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Correspondence to Meagan F. Oldfather.

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Oldfather, M.F. Ecoregion shapes the range response. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 730–731 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0586-6

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