Habitat stability affects dispersal and the ability to track climate change

Abstract

Habitat persistence should influence dispersal ability, selecting for stronger dispersal in habitats of lower temporal stability. As standing (lentic) freshwater habitats are on average less persistent over time than running (lotic) habitats, lentic species should show higher dispersal abilities than lotic species. Assuming that climate is an important determinant of species distributions, we hypothesize that lentic species should have distributions that are closer to equilibrium with current climate, and should more rapidly track climatic changes. We tested these hypotheses using datasets from 1988 and 2006 containing all European dragon-and damselfly species. Bioclimatic envelope models showed that lentic species were closer to climatic equilibrium than lotic species. Furthermore, the models over-predicted lotic species ranges more strongly than lentic species ranges, indicating that lentic species track climatic changes more rapidly than lotic species. These results are consistent with the proposed hypothesis that habitat persistence affects the evolution of dispersal.

Drivers of regional and local diversity of Amazonian stream Odonata

“…With increasing forest cover, the dominance of damselfly species increases, while the dominance of dragonflies decreases (De Marco et al ., ). Similar to other studies, our results suggest that Zygoptera species prefer forested habitats and better‐disperser Anisopterans prefer open habitats (Hof et al ., ). Here note that the metacommunity pools account for the influence of dispersal between local communities in ecological timescales, so the consistency in the determinants of odonate diversity at these two scales may be due to their common dependence on species movements within the landscape.…”

“…more impacted) stretches host higher species richness (Carvalho et al ., ; Mendes et al ., ). In fact, Anisoptera are considered to be major generalists associated to less stable environments (Remsburg & Turner, ; Mendes et al ., ; Miguel et al ., ), such as open, unstable, and, in general, lentic waterbodies (Hof et al ., ; Grewe et al ., ; Jaeschke et al ., ). Therefore, although we studied well‐preserved lotic Amazonian streamlets the small differences in their level of integrity and river attribute, (such as stream width and forest cover) were sufficient to generate different effects in the richness patterns of the two suborders.…”

Adult activity and temperature preference drives region-wide damselfly (Zygoptera) distributions under a warming climate

“…Nor did we find a significant relationship for larval or adult habitat preference, whether or not covariates and phylogeny were accounted for. By contrast, a large body of work [18,22,23] posits that stronger dispersal tendencies arise in lentic odonates because of greater habitat instability compared with lotic habitats; thus they have larger ranges and should be able to track climate change more closely. Unlike the above studies, we retained the generalists in our analysis and still we did not find any effect of habitat type on distribution because in this system at least, dispersal does not appear to be limiting.…”

Effects of climate, species interactions, and dispersal on decadal colonization and extinction rates of Iberian tree species

“…SDMs, especially under scenarios of climate change, have traditionally been fit with climatic variables only (Pearson and Dawson, 2003), yet it is well known that non-climatic factors affect the distribution of some species at particular spatial scales (Araújo and Pearson, 2005), many distributions are dynamic (Montoya et al, 2007;Peterson et al, 1999;Skov and Svenning, 2004;Woodward et al, 1990), such as those of poorly dispersing taxa that might rarely achieve equilibrium with climate (Araújo and Pearson, 2005; see also Hof et al, 2012), or those of taxa that were strongly affected by human activities in the past (e.g. tree species in mainland Spain, García-Valdés et al, 2013, 2015.…”