INTEGRATING FOSSILS, PHYLOGENIES, AND PALEOCLIMATE MODELS TO BETTER UNDERSTAND SPECIES AND COMMUNITIES RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CHANGE (Invited Presentation)

Fundamental understanding of how species and communities respond to climate change and environmental gradients should be supported by our understanding of how species and communities responded to past climate change, especially because modern responses are influenced by and exacerbated by anthropogenic pressures including human population growth, habitat destruction and fragmentation, and intensifying land use. There have been great advances in modeling species geographic distributions over shallow time scales during the Quaternary, where consideration of evolutionary change in physiological tolerances is likely less important due to shorter time for evolutionary change and speciation to occur. Over these shallow time scales, we have more resources for paleoclimate interpretation across large geographic landscapes (i.e., we have more and varied paleoclimate general circulation models of the ocean and atmosphere). We can also gain insight into species and community changes by studying deep records of temporal changes in one or several geographic locations. However, modeling species geographic distributions in deep time remains challenging because for many species there is sparse coverage of spatial and temporal occurrences and there are fewer paleoclimate general circulation models to help interpret the geographic distribution of climate availability. In addition, at deeper time scales, it is essential to consider species evolutionary change. I will present a framework that integrates evolutionary information in the form of phylogenetic relatedness from clades of extant closely related species, where and when there are associated fossil occurrences, and the geographic distribution of paleoclimate in deep time to infer species past geographic response to climate change and to estimate where and when there were hotspots of ancient diversification. This framework is supported by deep time projections of physiological models of climate tolerance. More work is needed to better understand the evolution of physiological tolerances and how physiological tolerances relate to the climate space in which species occur.