Regional variation exaggerates ecological divergence in niche models.

Area of Science:

• Evolutionary Biology
• Systematics
• Ecological Niche Modeling

Background:

• Systematics traditionally aims for biologically meaningful classifications.
• Ecological divergence is increasingly used alongside phylogenetic analyses.
• Testing the accuracy of ecological niche models has been challenging.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the accuracy of ecological niche models in inferring species' environmental requirements.
• To determine if geographic distributions can lead to erroneous conclusions about ecological divergence.
• To identify methods that may exaggerate ecological distinctness in phylogenetic studies.

Main Methods:

• Simulating geographic distributions for allopatric species with identical environmental requirements.
• Testing existing analyses that use geographic distributions to infer niche similarity.
• Comparing the performance of different analytical methods under simulated dispersal scenarios.

Main Results:

• Many analyses erroneously infer changes in environmental requirements when species disperse to different environments.
• The severity of erroneous inferences varies depending on the analytical method employed.
• Simulations demonstrate a potential exaggeration of ecologically distinct taxa within clades.

Conclusions:

• Geographic dispersal can confound inferences of ecological divergence, challenging current analytical approaches.
• Existing methods may overestimate ecological differences, potentially misguiding systematic classifications.
• Diagnostics are proposed to mitigate the problem of erroneously inferred ecological divergence.