Niche shift can impair the ability to predict invasion risk in the marine realm: an illustration using Mediterranean fish invaders |
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| Authors: | Valeriano Parravicini Ernesto Azzurro Michel Kulbicki Jonathan Belmaker |
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| Affiliation: | 1. CRIOBE, USR 3278 CNRS‐EPHE‐UPVD, LABEX ‘CORAIL’, University of Perpignan, Perpignan, France;2. IRD – UR 227 CoReUs, LABEX ‘CORAIL’, Laboratoire Arago, Banyuls/mer, France;3. CESAB‐FRB, Immeuble Henri Poincaré, Aix‐en‐Provence Cedex 3, France;4. ISPRA, Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, Livorno, Italy;5. Department of Zoology, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel |
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| Abstract: | Climatic niche conservatism, the tendency of species‐climate associations to remain unchanged across space and time, is pivotal for forecasting the spread of invasive species and biodiversity changes. Indeed, it represents one of the key assumptions underlying species distribution models (SDMs), the main tool currently available for predicting range shifts of species. However, to date, no comprehensive assessment of niche conservatism is available for the marine realm. We use the invasion by Indo‐Pacific tropical fishes into the Mediterranean Sea, the world's most invaded marine basin, to examine the conservatism of the climatic niche. We show that tropical invaders may spread far beyond their native niches and that SDMs do not predict their new distributions better than null models. Our results suggest that SDMs may underestimate the potential spread of invasive species and call for prudence in employing these models in order to forecast species invasion and their response to environmental change. |
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| Keywords: | Biological invasion niche conservatism niche expansion niche shift species distribution models |
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