Macroevolution of climatic niches in birds

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Susanne Fritz
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions ; Evolution, Anthropology
• Term: from 2014 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 251959543

Ecological niches of extant species are shaped by multiple drivers, e.g. abiotic conditions such as climate or biotic interactions between species; these drivers act not only in the present but also throughout the past history of species. My Emmy Noether project aims to understand climatic niche evolution in birds by investigating both ecological and evolutionary processes that shape climatic niches in space and time, with a focus on eight selected clades that contain a mix of migratory and sedentary bird species. In this renewal proposal, I aim to extend and build on my previous and ongoing work to investigate (i) how present and past climate might shape present-day seasonal avian diversity patterns (all ~10,500 species), and (ii) how rapid climate change since the Last Glacial Maximum and static climatic niches could have impacted seasonal geographic distributions and migratory vs. sedentary behaviour across species in the eight selected passerine bird clades (515 species). The proposed work will continue to integrate global-scale biological and climatological datasets and process-based methods, and profits from new and exciting developments. In two new work packages, I will address the influence of temporal changes in climatic conditions on the ecology and evolution of bird migration, shifting focus to a shorter timescale than the previous project phase, mostly from the Last Glacial Maximum to today. To achieve this, I will (i) directly test whether past and present climatic seasonality drive the compositional changes in bird assemblages that are caused by seasonal migration today and (ii) assess the macroevolutionary consequences of potential evolutionary volatility of migratory vs. sedentary behaviour over the last 21,000 years, by quantifying potential changes to the species’ seasonal geographic distributions as projected by static climatic niches during strong climate change between the Last Glacial Maximum and today. The integration of macroecological and macroevolutionary methods remains a major focus in this renewal project; in particular, analyses of drivers underlying global seasonal diversity patterns and species distribution models will be combined with reconstructions of movement behaviour during the recent and deep geological past. The unique and new angles compared to previous project phases are (i) the extension to global patterns across all avian species, and (ii) seasonal species distribution modelling during the Last Glacial Maximum. The use of a rigorous comparative framework with clades containing both migratory and sedentary species to study stability or volatility of climatic niches through time remains highly innovative. Results from this renewal project will be crucial for understanding the consequences of strong climate change over the last 21,000 years for present-day global diversity patterns, climatic niches, and the evolution of seasonal migration in birds.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups