Cradles of diversity are unlikely relics of regional climate stability

Damien A Fordham; Stuart C Brown; Tom M L Wigley; Carsten Rahbek

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2019.04.001

Cradles of diversity are unlikely relics of regional climate stability

Curr Biol. 2019 May 20;29(10):R356-R357. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.04.001.

Authors

Damien A Fordham¹, Stuart C Brown², Tom M L Wigley³, Carsten Rahbek⁴

Affiliations

¹ The Environment Institute and School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia; Center for Macroecology, Evolution, and Climate, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 15, 2100 Copenhagen O, Denmark. Electronic address: [email protected].
² The Environment Institute and School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia.
³ The Environment Institute and School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia; Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO 80307-3000, USA.
⁴ Center for Macroecology, Evolution, and Climate, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 15, 2100 Copenhagen O, Denmark; Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Ascot SL5 7PY, UK.

PMID: 31112682
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.04.001

Abstract

The stability of regional climates on millennial timescales is theorised to be a primary determinant of nearby diversification [1-5]. Using simulated patterns of past temperature change at monthly timescales [6], we show that the locations of climatically stable regions are likely to have varied considerably across and within millennia during glacial-interglacial cycles of the Late Quaternary. This result has important implications for the role of regional climate stability in theories of speciation, because long-term climate refugia are typically presumed to be 'cradles' of diversity (areas of high speciation) only if they remain stable across Milankovitch climate oscillations [1-5], which operate on multi-millennial time scales [7].

Publication types

Letter
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Biodiversity*
Climate
Climate Change*