Niche conservatism among continental species of the Philisca (Anyphaenidae) spiders

PACHECO, MARÍA PÍA; EDUARDO M. SOTO

Charlotte

Congreso; II Virtual Meeting of Systematics, Biogeography, and Evolution: The Research of Biodiversity and the Diversity of Researchers; 2021

The University of North Caroline at Charlotte

Philisca (Anyphaenidae) spiders inhabit the Valdivian forest ecoregion. The genus is constituted by fourteen species (eight continental, distributed along the Andes mountain range in both Chile and Argentina, and nine endemic to Robinson Crusoe island) that are divided into two clades with clear morphological dierences. The genus has been studied in recent years, however the potential areas where the species could be found and the variables that could determine those distributions were not analyzed. That is why habitat suitability models were developed and evaluated for seven continental species of the genus Philisca and after that, niche conservatism tests were carried out between the selected models for each species. The georeferenced data of each species were obtained from the collections of the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences "Bernardino Rivadavia" (MACN) and the California Academy of Sciences (CASENT). Before the analyzes, the database was reviewed in search of duplicate data and those whose georeferencing has been determined doubtful, in order not to consider them in the study. The nineteen environmental variables analyzed were obtained from ecoClimate. Those uncorrelated variables were selected from the analysis of the variance in variation factor (VIF) using R. Habitat suitability models (training percent: 30%, 100 replicates) were developed for each species considering different combinations of eatures" and egularization multipliers" using MaxEnt. The best model for each species was selected using the AICc and AUC. Niche conservatism was evaluated using ENMTools for the calculation of the Schoener (D) and Warren (I) index, and their subsequent comparison with the values of a null distribution generated by permutations (100). Preliminary results show that niches between species inside each clade were conserved but, niches among both clades of Philisca were not. Mean annual temperature would play an important role in determining the distributions of spiders of the genus Philisca. However, there would be dierent secondary environmental factors that determine the microenvironments occupied by the dierent species.