Scientists expect climate change to increase the frequency of extreme weather such as heat waves, droughts and hurricanes. Given that climate is an important driver of plant traits and functions, understanding how tolerances are evolutionarily conserved is key to predicting responses to climate change.
In this study, researchers used GBIF-mediated occurrences of more than 200,000 plant species to describe bioclimatic envelopes based on data for temperature, precipitation and solar radiation in datasets from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMRWF) and WorldClim.
To adjust for potential observation bias in the data, the authors weighted the species envelopes against a vegetation index derived from NASA satellite imaging as a proxy for true abundance. They also performed a correction of climate bias, recovering envelopes in idealized landscapes where all climates were equally available.
Using a revised supertree of more than 25,000 species, the authors found strong evidence for phylogenetic signals in the extracted bioclimatic parameters based on both climate datasets—particularly for minimum temperature and rainfall. The signals were even stronger when corrected for observation bias.
These findings provide further evidence that the climatic tolerances of plants are phylogenetically conserved, and that plants' response to climate change will depend on their branch of the evolutionary tree of life.