Effect of climate change in lizards of the genus Xenosaurus (Xenosauridae) based on projected changes in climatic suitability and climatic niche conservatism |
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Authors: | Christian Berriozabal‐Islas João Fabrício Mota Rodrigues Aurelio Ramírez‐Bautista Jorge L Becerra‐López Adrián Nieto‐Montes de Oca |
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Institution: | 1. Ecología de Poblaciones, Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo, Ciudad Universitaria (Ciudad del Conocimiento), Hidalgo, México;2. Departamento de Ecologia, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiania, Brazil;3. Laboratorio de Cambio Climático y Conservación de Recursos Naturales, Centro de Estudios Ecológicos, Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas, Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango, Gomez Palacio, México;4. Museo de Zoología, Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México, México |
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Abstract: | Accelerated climate change represents a major threat to the health of the planet's biodiversity. Particularly, lizards of the genus Xenosaurus might be negatively affected by this phenomenon because several of its species have restricted distributions, low vagility, and preference for low temperatures. No study, however, has examined the climatic niche of the species of this genus and how their distribution might be influenced by different climate change scenarios. In this project, we used a maximum entropy approach to model the climatic niche of 10 species of the genus Xenosaurus under present and future suitable habitat, considering a climatic niche conservatism context. Therefore, we performed a similarity analysis of the climatic niche between each species of the genus Xenosaurus. Our results suggest that a substantial decrease in suitable habitat for all species will occur by 2070. Among the most affected species, X. tzacualtipantecus will not have suitable conditions according to its climatic niche requirements and X. phalaroanthereon will lose 85.75% of its current suitable area. On the other hand, we found low values of conservatism of the climatic niche among species. Given the limited capacity of dispersion and the habitat specificity of these lizards, it seems unlikely that fast changes would occur in the distribution of these species facing climate change. The low conservatism in climatic niche we found in Xenosaurus suggests that these species might have the capacity to adapt to the new environmental conditions originated by climate change. |
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Keywords: | climatic variables cloud forest conservation endemism extinction niche overlap tropical vulnerability |
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