Environmental variation is a major predictor of global trait turnover in mammals |
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| Authors: | Ben G. Holt Gabriel C. Costa Caterina Penone Jean‐Philippe Lessard Thomas M. Brooks Ana D. Davidson S. Blair Hedges Volker C. Radeloff Carsten Rahbek Carlo Rondinini Catherine H. Graham |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Ascot, UK;2. Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, The Laboratory, Plymouth, Devon, UK;3. Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen ?, Denmark;4. Department of Biology, Auburn University at Montgomery, Montgomery, AL, USA;5. Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland;6. Department of Biology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada;7. IUCN, Gland, Switzerland;8. World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), University of the Philippines, Los Ba?os, Laguna, Philippines;9. University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia;10. Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA;11. NatureServe, Arlington, VA, USA;12. Center for Biodiversity, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA;13. SILVIS Lab, Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin‐Madison, Madison, WI, USA;14. Global Mammal Assessment Program, Department of Biology and Biotechnologies, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy;15. Swiss Federal Research Institute (WSL), Birmensdorf, Switzerland |
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| Abstract: | Aim To evaluate how environment and evolutionary history interact to influence global patterns of mammal trait diversity (a combination of 14 morphological and life‐history traits). Location The global terrestrial environment. Taxon Terrestrial mammals. Methods We calculated patterns of spatial turnover for mammalian traits and phylogenetic lineages using the mean nearest taxon distance. We then used a variance partitioning approach to establish the relative contribution of trait conservatism, ecological adaptation and clade specific ecological preferences on global trait turnover. Results We provide a global scale analysis of trait turnover across mammalian terrestrial assemblages, which demonstrates that phylogenetic turnover by itself does not predict trait turnover better than random expectations. Conversely, trait turnover is consistently more strongly associated with environmental variation than predicted by our null models. The influence of clade‐specific ecological preferences, reflected by the shared component of phylogenetic turnover and environmental variation, was considerably higher than expectations. Although global patterns of trait turnover are dependent on the trait under consideration, there is a consistent association between trait turnover and environmental predictive variables, regardless of the trait considered. Main conclusions Our results suggest that changes in phylogenetic composition are not always coupled with changes in trait composition on a global scale and that environmental conditions are strongly associated with patterns of trait composition across species assemblages, both within and across phylogenetic clades. |
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| Keywords: | beta diversity convergence distance matrices mammals mean nearest taxon distance multiple regression niche conservatism phylogeny traits |
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