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Spatio-temporal climate change contributes to latitudinal diversity gradients

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 3, pages 1419–1429 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG), where the number of species increases from the poles to the Equator, ranks among the broadest and most notable biodiversity patterns on Earth. The pattern of species-rich tropics relative to species-poor temperate areas has been recognized for well over a century, but the generative mechanisms are still debated vigorously. We use simulations to test whether spatio-temporal climatic changes could generate large-scale patterns of biodiversity as a function of only three biological processes—speciation, extinction and dispersal—omitting adaptive niche evolution, diversity-dependence and coexistence limits. In our simulations, speciation resulted from range disjunctions, whereas extinction occurred when no suitable sites were accessible to species. Simulations generated clear LDGs that closely match empirical LDGs for three major vertebrate groups. Higher tropical diversity primarily resulted from higher low-latitude speciation, driven by spatio-temporal variation in precipitation rather than in temperature. This suggests that spatio-temporal changes in low-latitude precipitation prompted geographical range disjunctions over Earth’s history, leading to high rates of allopatric speciation that contributed to LDGs. Overall, we show that major global biodiversity patterns can derive from interactions of species’ niches (fixed a priori in our simulations) with dynamic climate across complex, existing landscapes, without invoking biotic interactions or niche-related adaptations.

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Fig. 1: Schematic of the process of speciation and extinction in the simulation framework.
Fig. 2: Standardized mean number of species per 1° latitudinal band with standard error bars.
Fig. 3: Mean speciation (top) and extinction (bottom) rate per latitudinal band.
Fig. 4: Distribution of bird, mammal, amphibian and virtual species in the present day.
Fig. 5: Frequency of shifts from temperate to tropical biomes and vice versa by virtual species.
Fig. 6: Mean contribution of climate parameters to speciation (top) and extinction (bottom) in each 1° latitudinal band.

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Data availability

All data are available via Dryad: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.m6h850q.

Code availability

Note that the soft code for the simulations is provided in Appendix 1 and is freely available for use.

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Acknowledgements

We thank R. Colwell (University of Connecticut) and F. Condamine (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) for comments that greatly improved our contribution. We are indebted to D. Hill (Leeds), P. Wignall (Leeds) and R. Benson (Oxford) for thoughtful discussions that informed this manuscript. H.Q. was supported by the National Key Research and Development Project of China (no. 2017YFC1200603) and Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 31772432). E.E.S. acknowledges funding from a Division of Earth Sciences National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Fellowship and Leverhulme grant no. DGR01020. C.E.M. acknowledges funding from the NSF (no. 1601878).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Erin E. Saupe

  2. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Corinne E. Myers

  3. Biodiversity Institute, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

    A. Townsend Peterson & Jorge Soberón

  4. Department of Meteorology and Centre for Past Climate Change, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Joy Singarayer

  5. School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Paul Valdes

  6. Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Huijie Qiao

Authors
  1. Erin E. Saupe
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  2. Corinne E. Myers
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  3. A. Townsend Peterson
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  4. Jorge Soberón
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  5. Joy Singarayer
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  6. Paul Valdes
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  7. Huijie Qiao
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Contributions

E.E.S. designed the study. E.E.S. and H.Q. performed the analyses. J.Si. and P.V. provided the climate data and analysis. E.E.S. and H.Q. analysed the results. E.E.S. wrote the first draft of the manuscript and all authors (C.E.M., A.T.P., J.So., J.Si., P.V. and H.Q.) contributed to the revisions.

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Correspondence to Erin E. Saupe or Huijie Qiao.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Simulation protocol, Supplementary Tables 1–5 and Supplementary Figs. 1–60.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary code (Appendix 1)

Overview of the EcoEvo Simulator (EES) framework.

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Saupe, E.E., Myers, C.E., Townsend Peterson, A. et al. Spatio-temporal climate change contributes to latitudinal diversity gradients. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 1419–1429 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0962-7

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