Research

Ecological modeling of species responses to climate change

The environmental changes and habitat destruction being driven by climate change is known to affect the biodiversity. In this case, some taxa that are particularly sensitive to environmental changes are the first to be affected, and the stability of entire ecosystems can be disrupted. Despite decades of research investigating how climate change may affect population sizes, historical context is lacking and the traits which mediate demographic sensitivity to changing climate remain elusive. To solve this issue, we use the whole genome sequence data to reconstruct the demographic histories over the past one million years, which are the consequences of different patterns of responses to climate change among species with different genetic background, morphological and life-history traits (Germain, Feng et al, biorxiv, 2022). Our preliminary results identify direct and indirect effects of key traits representing survival, reproduction, and dispersal processes on long-term demographic responses to climate change and highlight traits most likely to influence population responses to on-going climate warming. Understanding how the genetic, ecological and environmental factors contribute to diverse adaptive strategies and biodiversity on the macroevolutionary scale can provide a new insight into the further of biodiversity in the current human-dominated natural environment.