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Predicting where species could go: climate is more important than dispersal for explaining the distribution of a South American turtle

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Abstract

Species distributions are determined by abiotic and biotic factors as well as dispersal, but most studies focus exclusively on abiotic (mainly climatic) components. In this study, we evaluated the influence of dispersal as a predictor for species distribution models (SDMs) using the turtle Mesoclemmys tuberculata as an example. We specifically tested whether dispersal is a better predictor of the distribution of M. tuberculata than climatic predictors. We sampled occurrence records of M. tuberculata to build SDMs and used the distance of each cell to the nearest river (river distance) as a predictor for dispersal. In addition, three bioclimatic predictors that quantify temperature and precipitation were used. We applied five different algorithms (BioClim, Domain, Maxent, SVM, and Random Forest) to model the distribution of M. tuberculata and evaluate the relative influence of each predictor variable. Although models including dispersal as a predictor performed slightly better than models omitting it, climatic predictors were found to be more important to describe species distribution across all SDMs. Our results suggest that although dispersal limits the potential geographic areas that the species may reach, abiotic parameters determine where M. tuberculata actually lives. Finally, we used consensus maps to prioritize areas for future field surveys.

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Acknowledgements

JFMR would like to thank Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) for the Ph.D. student fellowship and Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) for the researcher fellowship (Project MCTIC/CNPq Grant #proc. 465610/2014-5, Grant #380759/2017-9). MSL-R is grateful for the financial support from CNPq (Grant #447426/2014-1) and FAPEG (Grant #2012/1026.700.1086) to our research program on species distribution modeling. This manuscript is also part of the studies currently developed in the context of National Institutes for Science and Technology (Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia - INCT) in ecology, evolution, and biodiversity conservation, supported by MCTIC/CNPq (Grant #465610/2014-5) and FAPEG.

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  1. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ecologia e Evolução, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Campus Samambaia, CP 131, Goiânia, GO, 74001-970, Brazil

    João Fabrício Mota Rodrigues

  2. Laboratório de Macroecologia, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Regional Jataí, Jataí, GO, Brazil

    Matheus Souza Lima-Ribeiro

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  1. João Fabrício Mota Rodrigues
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Handling editor: Juan Carlos Molinero

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Supplementary figure and references containing occurrence records of Mesoclemmys tuberculata

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Rodrigues, J.F.M., Lima-Ribeiro, M.S. Predicting where species could go: climate is more important than dispersal for explaining the distribution of a South American turtle. Hydrobiologia 808, 343–352 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-017-3436-4

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