Biomechanics meets the ecological niche: the importance of temporal data resolution

Abstract

SUMMARY The emerging field of mechanistic niche modelling aims to link the functional traits of organisms to their environments to predict survival, reproduction, distribution and abundance. This approach has great potential to increase our understanding of the impacts of environmental change on individuals, populations and communities by providing functional connections between physiological and ecological response to increasingly available spatial environmental data. By their nature, such mechanistic models are more data intensive in comparison with the more widely applied correlative approaches but can potentially provide more spatially and temporally explicit predictions, which are often needed by decision makers. A poorly explored issue in this context is the appropriate level of temporal resolution of input data required for these models, and specifically the error in predictions that can be incurred through the use of temporally averaged data. Here, we review how biomechanical principles from heat-transfer and metabolic theory are currently being used as foundations for mechanistic niche models and consider the consequences of different temporal resolutions of environmental data for modelling the niche of a behaviourally thermoregulating terrestrial lizard. We show that fine-scale temporal resolution (daily) data can be crucial for unbiased inference of climatic impacts on survival, growth and reproduction. This is especially so for species with little capacity for behavioural buffering, because of behavioural or habitat constraints, and for detecting temporal trends. However, coarser-resolution data (long-term monthly averages) can be appropriate for mechanistic studies of climatic constraints on distribution and abundance limits in thermoregulating species at broad spatial scales.

Recurrent sublethal warming reduces embryonic survival, inhibits juvenile growth, and alters species distribution projections under climate change

“…Repeated exposure to sublethal highs can be more detrimental to fitness than acute exposure to extreme temperatures for some species (Kearney et al . ; Marshall & Sinclair ). Thus, the effects of sublethal warming drive responses to warming through impacts on development and stage‐specific mortality.…”

The impact of climate change on mediterranean intertidal communities: losses in coastal ecosystem integrity and services

“…This phase of the work was based on mechanistic ecophysiological (biophysical, BP;Helmuth 1998Helmuth , 1999 and bioenergetic (Dynamic Energy Budget, DEB; Kooijman 2010) models to estimate life history traits of target animals and to predict their distributions throughout study areas under current and future scenarios of increasing temperature in the context of climate change (see also Kearney et al 2010Kearney et al , 2012Kearney 2012;Sarà et al 2011bSarà et al , 2012. Given the lack of sufficient baseline information for most of the organisms examined in the present study (also combining results from systematic reviews and new primary data), modelling could only be performed on mussels.…”

From global change to a butterfly flapping: biophysics and behaviour affect tropical climate change impacts

“…Temporally, recent studies have shown the importance of examining diurnal, seasonal and inter-annual time scales for understanding warming impacts across latitude [2,6,50,51]. In addition to altering performance curves [49], temporal variation can be critical for species in buffering climate change impacts, especially for species with limited behavioural thermoregulation capacity [52]. As shown in this study (figures 1 and 2), the variation in air temperature at different scales (minutes, hours, years) may not be entirely sufficient to characterize the thermal environment given the high variation in body temperature at these scales.…”