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Costa-Pereira R, Shaner PJL. The spatiotemporal context of individual specialization in resource use and environmental associations. J Anim Ecol 2024. [PMID: 38706400 DOI: 10.1111/1365-2656.14090] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/14/2023] [Accepted: 03/14/2024] [Indexed: 05/07/2024]
Abstract
1. Individual niche specialization is widespread in natural populations and has key implications for higher levels of biological organization. This phenomenon, however, has been primarily quantified in resource niche axes, overlooking individual variation in environmental associations (i.e. abiotic conditions organisms experience). 2. Here, we explore what we can learn from a multidimensional perspective of individual niche specialization that integrates resource use and environmental associations into a common framework. 3. By combining predictions from theory and simple simulations, we illustrate how (i) multidimensional intraspecific niche variation and (ii) the spatiotemporal context of interactions between conspecifics scale up to shape emergent patterns of the population niche. 4. Contemplating individual specialization as a multidimensional, unifying concept across biotic and abiotic niche axes is a fundamental step towards bringing this concept closer to the n-dimensional niche envisioned by Hutchinson.
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Affiliation(s)
- Raul Costa-Pereira
- Department of Animal Biology, Institute of Biology, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), Campinas, Brazil
| | - Pei-Jen Lee Shaner
- Department of Life Science, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan
- Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan
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2
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Chan SF, Rubenstein DR, Chen IC, Fan YM, Tsai HY, Zheng YW, Shen SF. Higher temperature variability in deforested mountain regions impacts the competitive advantage of nocturnal species. Proc Biol Sci 2023; 290:20230529. [PMID: 37221845 PMCID: PMC10206452 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2023.0529] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/03/2023] [Accepted: 04/28/2023] [Indexed: 05/25/2023] Open
Abstract
Deforestation is a major contributor to biodiversity loss, yet the impact of forest loss on daily microclimate variability and its implications for species with different daily activity patterns remain poorly understood. Using a recently developed microclimate model, we investigated the effects of deforestation on the daily temperature range (DTR) in low-elevation tropical regions and high-elevation temperate regions. Our results show that deforestation substantially increases DTR in these areas, suggesting a potential impact on species interactions. To test this hypothesis, we studied the competitive interactions between nocturnal burying beetles and all-day-active blowfly maggots in forested and deforested habitats in Taiwan. We show that deforestation leads to increased DTR at higher elevations, which enhances the competitiveness of blowfly maggots during the day and leads to a higher failure rate of carcass burial by the beetles at night. Thus, deforestation-induced temperature variability not only modulates exploitative competition between species with different daily activity patterns, but also likely exacerbates the negative impacts of climate change on nocturnal organisms. In order to limit potential adverse effects on species interactions and their ecological functions, our study highlights the need to protect forests, especially in areas where deforestation can greatly alter temperature variability.
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Affiliation(s)
- Shih-Fan Chan
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei 11529, Taiwan
- Department of Life Science, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, 11677 Taiwan
- Biodiversity Program, Taiwan International Graduate Program, Academia Sinica and National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei 11529, Taiwan
| | - Dustin R. Rubenstein
- Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
- Center for Integrative Animal Behavior, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
| | - I-Ching Chen
- Department of Life Sciences, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 70101, Taiwan
| | - Yu-Meng Fan
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei 11529, Taiwan
| | - Hsiang-Yu Tsai
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei 11529, Taiwan
- Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
| | - Yuan-Wen Zheng
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei 11529, Taiwan
| | - Sheng-Feng Shen
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei 11529, Taiwan
- Department of Life Science, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, 11677 Taiwan
- Biodiversity Program, Taiwan International Graduate Program, Academia Sinica and National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei 11529, Taiwan
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3
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Wooliver R, Vtipilthorpe EE, Wiegmann AM, Sheth SN. A viewpoint on ecological and evolutionary study of plant thermal performance curves in a warming world. AOB PLANTS 2022; 14:plac016. [PMID: 35615255 PMCID: PMC9126585 DOI: 10.1093/aobpla/plac016] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/14/2022] [Accepted: 04/07/2022] [Indexed: 06/06/2023]
Abstract
We can understand the ecology and evolution of plant thermal niches through thermal performance curves (TPCs), which are unimodal, continuous reaction norms of performance across a temperature gradient. Though there are numerous plant TPC studies, plants remain under-represented in syntheses of TPCs. Further, few studies quantify plant TPCs from fitness-based measurements (i.e. growth, survival and reproduction at the individual level and above), limiting our ability to draw conclusions from the existing literature about plant thermal adaptation. We describe recent plant studies that use a fitness-based TPC approach to test fundamental ecological and evolutionary hypotheses, some of which have uncovered key drivers of climate change responses. Then, we outline three conceptual questions in ecology and evolutionary biology for future plant TPC studies: (i) Do populations and species harbour genetic variation for TPCs? (ii) Do plant TPCs exhibit plastic responses to abiotic and biotic factors? (iii) Do fitness-based TPCs scale up to population-level thermal niches? Moving forward, plant ecologists and evolutionary biologists can capitalize on TPCs to understand how plasticity and adaptation will influence plant responses to climate change.
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Affiliation(s)
- Rachel Wooliver
- Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA
| | - Emma E Vtipilthorpe
- Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA
| | - Amelia M Wiegmann
- Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA
| | - Seema N Sheth
- Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA
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4
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Liu M, Rubenstein DR, Cheong SA, Shen SF. Antagonistic effects of long- and short-term environmental variation on species coexistence. Proc Biol Sci 2021; 288:20211491. [PMID: 34493074 PMCID: PMC8424298 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.1491] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/30/2021] [Accepted: 08/13/2021] [Indexed: 11/12/2022] Open
Abstract
Assessing the impact of environmental fluctuations on species coexistence is critical for understanding biodiversity loss and the ecological impacts of climate change. Yet determining how properties like the intensity, frequency or duration of environmental fluctuations influence species coexistence remains challenging, presumably because previous studies have focused on indefinite coexistence. Here, we model the impact of environmental fluctuations at different temporal scales on species coexistence over a finite time period by employing the concepts of time-windowed averaging and performance curves to incorporate temporal niche differences within a stochastic Lotka-Volterra model. We discover that short- and long-term environmental variability has contrasting effects on transient species coexistence, such that short-term variation favours species coexistence, whereas long-term variation promotes competitive exclusion. This dichotomy occurs because small samples (e.g. environmental changes over long time periods) are more likely to show large deviations from the expected mean and are more difficult to predict than large samples (e.g. environmental changes over short time periods), as described in the central limit theorem. Consequently, we show that the complex set of relationships among environmental fluctuations and species coexistence found in previous studies can all be synthesized within a general framework by explicitly considering both long- and short-term environmental variation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ming Liu
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei 11529, Taiwan
- Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3SZ, UK
| | - Dustin R. Rubenstein
- Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
- Center for Integrative Animal Behavior, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
| | - Siew Ann Cheong
- Division of Physics and Applied Physics, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, 637371, Singapore
| | - Sheng-Feng Shen
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei 11529, Taiwan
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Tsai HY. Digest: Predicting the future by learning from the past in lizards' thermal traits. Evolution 2021; 75:2613-2615. [PMID: 34423849 DOI: 10.1111/evo.14333] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/19/2021] [Accepted: 08/17/2021] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Abstract
How do traitsevolve on a global scale? Ibargüengoytía et al. provide a framework for understanding the evolutionary history of thermal traits in a broadly diverse lizard family Liolaemidae and find that the lizards' body temperature has evolved following the change in air temperature over the past ∼20,000 years, while the preferred body temperature for physiological functions has evolved at a lower rate. This difference results in a higher buffer to respond to global climate change, in particular for viviparous species, which usually show lower body temperatures in their natural environments. Oviparous species from the arid environments are at higher risk of extinction in the family Liolaemidae.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hsiang-Yu Tsai
- Department of Ecology and Evolution, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 60637
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Tsai HY, Rubenstein DR, Chen BF, Liu M, Chan SF, Chen DP, Sun SJ, Yuan TN, Shen SF. Antagonistic effects of intraspecific cooperation and interspecific competition on thermal performance. eLife 2020; 9:57022. [PMID: 32807299 PMCID: PMC7442485 DOI: 10.7554/elife.57022] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/18/2020] [Accepted: 07/28/2020] [Indexed: 01/03/2023] Open
Abstract
Understanding how climate-mediated biotic interactions shape thermal niche width is critical in an era of global change. Yet, most previous work on thermal niches has ignored detailed mechanistic information about the relationship between temperature and organismal performance, which can be described by a thermal performance curve. Here, we develop a model that predicts the width of thermal performance curves will be narrower in the presence of interspecific competitors, causing a species' optimal breeding temperature to diverge from that of its competitor. We test this prediction in the Asian burying beetle Nicrophorus nepalensis, confirming that the divergence in actual and optimal breeding temperatures is the result of competition with their primary competitor, blowflies. However, we further show that intraspecific cooperation enables beetles to outcompete blowflies by recovering their optimal breeding temperature. Ultimately, linking abiotic factors and biotic interactions on niche width will be critical for understanding species-specific responses to climate change.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hsiang-Yu Tsai
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.,Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, College of Life Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
| | - Dustin R Rubenstein
- Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology, Columbia University, New York, United States.,Center for Integrative Animal Behavior, Columbia University, New York, United States
| | - Bo-Fei Chen
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
| | - Mark Liu
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
| | - Shih-Fan Chan
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
| | - De-Pei Chen
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.,Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, College of Life Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
| | - Syuan-Jyun Sun
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
| | - Tzu-Neng Yuan
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
| | - Sheng-Feng Shen
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.,Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, College of Life Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
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