Browsing by Author "Sunday, Jennifer"

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    The evolution of critical thermal limits of life on earth
    (Nature, 2021-02-19) Bennett, Joanne M.; Sunday, Jennifer; Calosi, Piero; Villalobos, Fabricio; Martinez, Brezo; Molina-Venegas, Rafae; Araujo, Miguel B.; Algar, Adam C.; Clusella-Trullas, Susana; Hawkins, Bradford A.; Keith, Sally A.; Kuhn, Ingolf; Rahbek, Carsten; Rodriguez, Laura; Singer, Alexander; Morales-Castilla, Ignacio; Olalla-Tarraga, Miguel Angel
    Understanding how species’ thermal limits have evolved across the tree of life is central to predicting species’ responses to climate change. Here, using experimentally-derived estimates of thermal tolerance limits for over 2000 terrestrial and aquatic species, we show that most of the variation in thermal tolerance can be attributed to a combination of adaptation to current climatic extremes, and the existence of evolutionary ‘attractors’ that reflect either boundaries or optima in thermal tolerance limits. Our results also reveal deep-time climate legacies in ectotherms, whereby orders that originated in cold paleoclimates have presently lower cold tolerance limits than those with warm thermal ancestry. Conversely, heat tolerance appears unrelated to climate ancestry. Cold tolerance has evolved more quickly than heat tolerance in endotherms and ectotherms. If the past tempo of evolution for upper thermal limits continues, adaptive responses in thermal limits will have limited potential to rescue the large majority of species given the unprecedented rate of contemporary climate change.
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    GlobTherm, a global database on thermal tolerances for aquatic and terrestrial organisms
    (Nature Research, 2018-03-13) Bennett, Joanne M.; Calosi, Piero; Clusella-Trullas, Susana; Martinez, Brezo; Sunday, Jennifer; Algar, Adam C.; Araujo, Miguel B.; Hawkins, Bradford A.; Keith, Sally; Kuhn, Ingolf; Rahbek, Carsten; Rodriguez, Laura; Singer, Alexander; Villalobos, Fabricio; Olalla-Tarraga, Miguel Angel; Morales-Castilla, Ignacio
    How climate affects species distributions is a longstanding question receiving renewed interest owing to the need to predict the impacts of global warming on biodiversity. Is climate change forcing species to live near their critical thermal limits? Are these limits likely to change through natural selection? These and other important questions can be addressed with models relating geographical distributions of species with climate data, but inferences made with these models are highly contingent on non-climatic factors such as biotic interactions. Improved understanding of climate change effects on species will require extensive analysis of thermal physiological traits, but such data are both scarce and scattered. To overcome current limitations, we created the GlobTherm database. The database contains experimentally derived species’ thermal tolerance data currently comprising over 2,000 species of terrestrial, freshwater, intertidal and marine multicellular algae, plants, fungi, and animals. The GlobTherm database will be maintained and curated by iDiv with the aim to keep expanding it, and enable further investigations on the effects of climate on the distribution of life on Earth.