Abstract
The Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI) was a remarkable biogeographic event of biodiversity exchange between North and South America. Climate change has been pointed to as one of the main factors driving species dispersal across the continent, although this hypothesis has not been tested thus far. Here, we use paleontological ecological niche models (PaleoENMs) throughout the last five million years to test if climate change triggered the dispersal of mammalian species and/or caused the extinction of dispersing species during the GABI. We used extant and fossil occurrences for 189 mammalian species related to the GABI along with paleoclimate data to obtain species distributions from PaleoENMs. We calculated dispersal and extinction rates between North, Central, and South America and applied quantile regression models to test the effect of climatic anomalies in these rates. Our results indicate that temperature change, particularly cooling, triggered mammal dispersals during the GABI. On the other hand, we found the extinction rate in South America to be caused by warming. We recognize that the GABI is a complex event and that several factors likely affected it. Nonetheless, our results indicate that climate was one of these factors.
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Acknowledgements
This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES)—Finance Code 001. Research by LCT and MSLR is continuously supported by CNPq productivity grants. This paper was developed in the context of the National Institutes for Science and Technology (INCT) in Ecology, Evolution, and Biodiversity Conservation, supported by MCTIC/CNpq (proc. 465610/2014-5) and FAPEG. We thank Elisa B. Pereira for climate data availability.
Funding
Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior,National Institutes for Science and Technology (INCT) in Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity Conservation, MCTIC/CNpq (proc. 465610/2014–5) and FAPEG, MCTIC/CNpq (proc. 465610/2014–5) and FAPEG, MCTIC/CNpq (proc. 465610/2014–5) and FAPEG, MCTIC/CNpq (proc. 465610/2014–5) and FAPEG, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico.
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All authors contributed to manuscript preparation. RFO, MLR, and LCT developed the manuscript proposal. RFO analyzed and wrote the manuscript. All authors revised and edited the manuscript.
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Freitas-Oliveira, R., Lima-Ribeiro, M., Faleiro, F.V. et al. Temperature changes affected mammal dispersal during the Great American Biotic Interchange. J Mammal Evol 31, 20 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10914-024-09717-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10914-024-09717-4