The fate of endemic insects of the Andean region under the effect of global warming

MELO, MARÍA CECILIA; DEL RÍO, MARÍA GUADALUPE; MONTEMAYOR, SARA I.; ROIG, SERGIO A.; POCCO, MARTINA E.; SCHEIBLER, ERICA E.; SCATTOLINI, MARÍA CELESTE; DELLAPÉ, PABLO M.; DELLAPÉ, GIMENA; CAZORLA, CARLA G.

PLOS ONE

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

Año: 2017 vol. 12 p. 1 - 17

1932-6203

Three independent but complementary lines of research have provided evidence for the recognitionof refugia: paleontology, phylogeography and species distributional modelling(SDM). SDM assesses the ecological requirements of a species based on its known occurrencesand enables its distribution to be projected on past climatological reconstructions.One advantage over the other two approaches is that it provides an explicit link to environmentand geography, thereby enabling the analysis of a large number of taxa in the searchfor more general refugia patterns. We propose a methodology for using SDM to recognizebiogeographical patterns of endemic insects from Southern South America. We built speciesdistributional models for 59 insect species using Maxent. The species analyzed in thestudy have narrow niche breadth and were classified into four assemblages according to theecoregion they inhabit. Models were built for the Late Pleistocene, Mid-Holocene and Present.Through the procedure developed for this study we used the models to recognize: LatePleistocene refugia; areas with high species richness during all three periods; climaticallyconstant areas (in situ refugia); consistent patterns among in situ refugia, Pleistocene refugiaand current distribution of endemic species. We recognized two adjacent Pleistocenerefugia with distinct climates; four in situ refugia, some of which are undergoing a process offragmentation and retraction or enlargement. Interestingly, we found a congruent patternamong in situ refugia, Pleistocene refugia and endemic species. Our results seem to be consistentwith the idea that long-term climate stability is known to have a key role in promotingpersistence of biodiversity in an area. Our Pleistocene and in situ refugia are consistent withrefugia identified in studies focusing on different taxa and applying other methodologies,showing that the method developed can be used to identify such areas and prove theirimportance for conservation.