Understanding the many factors that have played into shaping the biodiversity within Earth\u2019s ecosystems can be daunting. In a major step to that end, an international team of researchers built a computer simulation that takes into account many of the fundamental factors that drive evolutionary adaptation and extinction.<\/p>\n
Their study, published today in Science<\/em>, brings us closer to knowing the complex interactions between topography and climate change, and how these factors influence the evolutionary histories and biodiversity of species in natural ecosystems.<\/p>\n The model created by researchers at the University of Connecticut, the Federal University of\u00a0Goi\u00e1s in Brazil, and The Open University in the U.K., details\u00a0biogeographical cradles, museums, and graves. Cradles are areas where new species form; museums, areas where species persist; and graves, areas where extinctions take place.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had hoped to be able to model in the simulation the most fundamental processes that shape the geography of life on Earth,\u201d says Robert Colwell,\u00a0\u00a0emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, who led the research with Thiago F. Rangel (PhD \u201810), and with Neil Edwards and Philip Holden at The Open University.<\/p>\n To find these answers, the researchers looked to the most climatically and biologically diverse continent on earth, South America, to develop and test their model. As the Andes mountain range began to develop 25 million years ago, it created a varied landscape that would give rise to a rich biodiversity, and the perfect setting to study the ecology and evolution of biodiversity.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Andes are the longest mountain range on Earth, and the only trans-tropical one. They sit right beside the Amazon, the planet\u2019s largest tropical rainforest and river basin. This is the reason South America has such exuberant biodiversity,” says Rangel.<\/p>\n Collaborators at The Open University built a model of the ancient climate of South America. Combining conventional and statistical approaches to climate modeling, the researchers were able to model, for the first time, the changing climate in detail over hundreds of millennia, far longer than would otherwise have been possible. The model spans a time scale of 800,000 years, to the earliest ice-core records, and estimates temperature and precipitation at 500-year intervals during repeated cycles of glaciation and thawing in a period called the late Quaternary climate cycles.<\/p>\n Speciation, or the evolution of new species from ancestral species, is a process made complicated by various factors, such as the changing climate, geographical, and topographical features. These factors can all lead to the splitting or isolation of populations and the establishment of new species. Over time, new species arise, persist, expand to new areas, or go extinct, and the reasons as to why any of those events occur are not always clear.<\/p>\n Through computer simulation, the team was able to estimate the lifetime trajectory of species, starting with origination and ending at one of three points: when the species splits into daughter species, when the species ended in extinction, or the species persisted.<\/p>\n At each time step of the simulation, the geographical range — the location — of each species was recorded. The team found that the trajectories were driven by the glacial cycles, leading to episodes of origination and extinction caused by changes in species ranges in the complex topography of the continent, allowing the researchers to map cradles and graves of diversity.<\/p>\n Surprisingly, the model was able to reproduce maps of biodiversity that closely resemble maps of present-day species of birds, mammal, and plants, despite accounting for only the most fundamental of processes and having no specific target pattern of biodiversity, according to Colwell.<\/p>\n \u201cThe majority of living species in South America are more ancient than 800,000 years, but our results suggest that even the ancient species have been moved around in the same way as younger species, all contributing the same patterns of species richness,\u201d says Colwell.<\/p>\n The researchers think the most likely explanation is the strong influence of changing climate during the glacial cycles, as it interacts with the topography of the landscape. Changes in temperature and precipitation will have profound impact on species ranges, fragmenting, shuffling, and eliminating ranges, regardless of the species\u2019 age.<\/p>\n \u201cOur results demonstrate how intimately the evolution of life depends on the co-evolving physical environment,\u201d says Neil Edwards of The Open University modelling team.<\/p>\n This model comes at a crucial time, one of unprecedented climate change. While the simulation is based on a different time period, it shows the dynamic power of climate change and the ways it shapes life on Earth.<\/p>\n \u201cThe current pace of human driven climate change is much, much faster than anything in our model, but the same processes are happening in terms of species\u2019 range shifts today,\u201d says Colwell.<\/p>\n This work has<\/em> been continuously supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cient\u00edfico e Tecnol\u00f3gico (CNPq) (grants PQ309550\/2015-7, PQ301799\/2016-4, and FAPEG\/INCT465610\/2014-5). <\/em>Coordena\u00e7\u00e3o de Aperfei\u00e7oamento de Pessoal de N\u00edvel Superior (CAPES) (grant SWB134\/2012). <\/em>CNPq (grant DTI380.376\/2017-2) and <\/em>the Danish National Research Foundation for its support of the Center for Macroecology, Evolution, and Climate (grant DNRF96)<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The study, published today in Science, brings us closer to knowing the complex interactions between topography and climate change, and how these factors influence the evolutionary histories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":118,"featured_media":139686,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2076,2387,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2093],"class_list":["post-139627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-research","category-sustainability","category-uconn-storrs"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-08 11:08:31","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/118"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139627"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140159,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139627\/revisions\/140159"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/139686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139627"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=139627"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=139627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}