Climatic niche shifts and ecological sky-island dynamics in Mesoamerican montane birds.

Ecol Evol

Museo de Zoología, Facultad de Ciencias Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Mexico City Mexico.

Published: September 2024

AI Article Synopsis

  • The study investigates how climate influences the distribution and evolution of Neotropical humid montane forest birds, focusing on differences in their climatic niches at various levels of analysis.
  • It employs ecological niche models (ENMs) and statistical techniques to examine niche overlap and test hypotheses about the environmental requirements of different bird lineages.
  • Findings suggest that historical climate changes have shaped the distribution and connectivity of these bird species, indicating that they do not share identical climatic preferences and thus may face ecological barriers due to past climatic conditions.

Article Abstract

An ongoing challenge in evolutionary and ecological research focuses on testing biogeographic hypotheses for the understanding of both species' distributional patterns and of the factors influencing range limits. In this study, we described the climatic niches of Neotropical humid montane forest birds through the analysis of factors driving their evolution at inter- and intraspecific levels; and tested for differences among allopatric lineages within and . We employed ecological niche models (ENMs) along with an ordination approach with kernel smoothing to perform niche overlap analyses and test hypotheses of niche equivalence/similarity among lineages. In addition, we described the potential distributions of each lineage during the Late Pleistocene climate fluctuations, identifying historical range expansions, connectivity, and stability. Overall, we observed differences in environmental variables influencing climatic requirements and distributional patterns for our selected species. We detected the highest values of niche overlap mainly between and some lineages. At both interspecific and intraspecific levels, sister lineages showed non-identical environmental niches. Our results offer weak support to a moist forest model, in which populations followed the expansion and contraction cycles of montane forests, leading to a lack of niche conservatism among lineages (they tend to occupy not identical climatic environments) throughout Mesoamerica. Therefore, historical climatic conditions may act as ecological barriers determining the distributional ranges of these species.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11374531PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.70236DOI Listing

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