Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 278, Issue 1725, Pages 3644-3653Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2769
Keywords
ecological niche modelling; hind-casting; ice age refugia; disequilibrium; plant species distributions; postglacial recolonization
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Funding
- Faculty of Science at Aarhus University
- Danish Ministry of Science [2133-06-0008]
- Danish Council for Independent Research-Natural Sciences [272-07-0242, 10-085056]
- Aarhus University Research Foundation [AUFF F2010-2-34]
- German Science Foundation [DFG TA 311/2]
- Biodiversity and Climate Research Center (BIK-F)
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The influence of dispersal limitation on species ranges remains controversial. Considering the dramatic impacts of the last glaciation in Europe, species might not have tracked climate changes through time and, as a consequence, their present-day ranges might be in disequilibrium with current climate. For 1016 European plant species, we assessed the relative importance of current climate and limited postglacial migration in determining species ranges using regression modelling and explanatory variables representing climate, and a novel species-specific hind-casting-based measure of accessibility to postglacial colonization. Climate was important for all species, while postglacial colonization also constrained the ranges of more than 50 per cent of the species. On average, climate explained five times more variation in species ranges than accessibility, but accessibility was the strongest determinant for one-sixth of the species. Accessibility was particularly important for species with limited long-distance dispersal ability, with southern glacial ranges, seed plants compared with ferns, and small-range species in southern Europe. In addition, accessibility explained one-third of the variation in species' disequilibrium with climate as measured by the realized/potential range size ratio computed with niche modelling. In conclusion, we show that although climate is the dominant broad-scale determinant of European plant species ranges, constrained dispersal plays an important supplementary role.
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