Strong phylogenetic signals in global plant bioclimatic envelopes

Aim The environmental preferences of species are an important facet their response to changing conditions, and these have long been thought exhibit phylogenetic conservatism. However, bioclimatic envelopes not previously imputed from climate records at the date location occurrence, strength signal has studied a broad scale. Here, we combine global reconstructions with contemporaneous plant occurrences for all available terrestrial test niche conservatism in climatic traits. Location Global. Time period 1901–2018. Major taxa Terrestrial plants. Methods We used >100 million Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) produce distributions >200,000 species, using range variables. matched observations historical European Centre Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) compared this WorldClim averages. tested supertree plants Pagel's ?. Finally, investigate how well could be inferred poorly known rare performed cross-validation by removing occurrence some common accurately were estimated. Results found extremely strong signals (? > 0.9 cases) variables both datasets, including temperature, soil solar radiation precipitation. also able impute missing artificially removed having correlation observed data .7. Main conclusions reconstructed tolerances historically recorded on GBIF technique that applied any comparable biodiversity dataset. Although information most is sparse, explored methods bias correction imputation, positive results both.