How Does Climate Influence Speciation?

How does climate influence speciation?

Variation in climatic conditions over space and time is thought to be an important driver of speciation. However, the role of climate has not been explored in the theoretical literature on speciation, and the theory underlying empirical studies of climate and speciation has come largely from informal, verbal models. In this study, we develop a quantitative model to test a relatively new but the...

Does hybridisation influence speciation?

As Butlin et al. (2012) emphasise, hybridisation occurs almost inevitably during speciation. Moreover, studying patterns of introgression across the genome, and the spatial structure of hybrid zones, can tell us much about the genetics of divergence and reproductive isolation. Nevertheless, hybridisation may well have a negligible effect on the actual process of speciation. On the one hand, uni...

How Does Money Influence Health?

How does climate change cause extinction?

Anthropogenic climate change is predicted to be a major cause of species extinctions in the next 100 years. But what will actually cause these extinctions? For example, will it be limited physiological tolerance to high temperatures, changing biotic interactions or other factors? Here, we systematically review the proximate causes of climate-change related extinctions and their empirical suppor...

Does climate directly influence NPP globally?

The need for rigorous analyses of climate impacts has never been more crucial. Current textbooks state that climate directly influences ecosystem annual net primary productivity (NPP), emphasizing the urgent need to monitor the impacts of climate change. A recent paper challenged this consensus, arguing, based on an analysis of NPP for 1247 woody plant communities across global climate gradient...