Ecological niche shifts and environmental space anisotropy: a cautionary note

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Issue Date
2011Author
Soberón, Jorge
Peterson, A. Townsend
Publisher
Instituto de Biología
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
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Show full item recordAbstract
The anisotropic structure of climatic space may cause significant (and to a large extent unappreciated) nonevolutionary niche shifts. This can be seen mostly in the context of spatial transferability of ecological niche models. We explore this effect using a virtual species in the United States. We created a simple virtual species by postulating its fundamental niche as an ellipse in a two-dimensional realistic climatic space. The climatic combinations defined by the ellipse were projected in the geography of the United States and 2 regions of equal area were selected. The structure of niche in the 2 areas is compared. It is shown that the 2 regions have differently positioned subsets of the environmental space, which creates “shifts” in the realized niches despite the fact that no evolution and no biotic interactions are present. The most parsimonious hypothesis when ecological niche modeling reveals shifts in the realized niche is that
environmental space is heterogeneous. Without considering differences in the structure of environmental space no speculation about niche evolution or the role of competitors should be attempted.
Description
This is the publisher's version, which the author has permission to share. The original version may be found at the following link: http://www.scielo.org.mxscielo.php?script=sci_home&lng=es&nrm=iso
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Citation
Soberón, J. and Peterson, T. 2011. Ecological niche and environmental space anisotropy: a cautionary note. Revista Mexicana de Biodiversidad 82: 1348-1355.
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