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Climate-driven range shifts of the king penguin in a fragmented ecosystem

Matters Arising to this article was published on 28 January 2019

Abstract

Range shift is the primary short-term species response to rapid climate change, but it is often hampered by natural or anthropogenic habitat fragmentation. Different critical areas of a species’ niche may be exposed to heterogeneous environmental changes and modelling species response under such complex spatial and ecological scenarios presents well-known challenges. Here, we use a biophysical ecological niche model validated through population genomics and palaeodemography to reconstruct past range shifts and identify future vulnerable areas and potential refugia of the king penguin in the Southern Ocean. Integrating genomic and demographic data at the whole-species level with specific biophysical constraints, we present a refined framework for predicting the effect of climate change on species relying on spatially and ecologically distinct areas to complete their life cycle (for example, migratory animals, marine pelagic organisms and central-place foragers) and, in general, on species living in fragmented ecosystems.

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Fig. 1: Past and future breeding range of the king penguin.
Fig. 2: King and emperor penguins’ past demography in response to Quaternary climate change.
Fig. 3: Convergent and divergent effects of climate change.

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Acknowledgements

This work was conducted within the framework of the Programme 137 of the Institut Polaire Français Paul-Emile Victor (IPEV; CLB), with additional support from the French National Research Agency (ANR) ‘PICASO’ grant (ANR-2010-BLAN-1728-01; Y.L.M.), Marie Curie Intra European Fellowships (FP7-PEOPLE-IEF-2008, European Commission; project no. 235962 to C.L.B. and FP7-PEOPLE-IEF-2010, European Commission; project no. 252252 to E.T.), the Centre Scientifique de Monaco through the budget allocated to the Laboratoire International Associé 647 BioSensib (CSM/CNRS-University of Strasbourg; C.L.B., Y.L.M.), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Programme Zone Atelier de Recherches sur l’Environnement Antarctique et Subantarctique), South African National Antarctic Programme (P.P.) and the IPEV Programme 109 (Y.C.). Logistic and field costs of research were supported by the IPEV Programme 137 (C.L.B.), the South African Department of Environmental Affairs and the National Research Foundation (P.P.). This work was performed on the Abel Cluster, owned by the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Metacenter for High Performance Computing (NOTUR), and operated by the Department for Research Computing at USIT, the University of Oslo. We are very grateful to M. Skage, A. Tooming-Klunderud, M. Selander-Hansen and the Norwegian Sequencing Center for their very valuable help in the laboratory, as well as L. Nederbragt and M. Matschiner for their assistance with the Abel cluster, and M. Fumagalli and T. Korneliussen for their precious advice regarding ngsTools and ANGSD. We thank G. Bertorelle, L. Fusani, A. Mazzarella and D. Fordham for useful comments and advice. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modelling groups (listed in Supplementary Table 1) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP, the US Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals.

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C.L.B. and E.T. conceived and supervised the study. C.L.B., F.B., Y.C. and P.P. collected the samples. R.C. performed DNA extraction, library preparation, and prepared and performed the genomic and demographic analyses and the climate modelling. X.L. and E.T. participated in the genomic and demographic analyses. V.R. and C.L.B. participated in climate modelling. N.C.S. hosted the project. R.C., C.L.B. and E.T. wrote the manuscript. F.B., N.C.S., P.P., Y.C., Y.L.M. and V.R. commented the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Céline Le Bohec or Emiliano Trucchi.

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Cristofari, R., Liu, X., Bonadonna, F. et al. Climate-driven range shifts of the king penguin in a fragmented ecosystem. Nature Clim Change 8, 245–251 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0084-2

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