Vortrag, 41st Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland (GFÖ), Oldenburg: 05.09.2011 - 09.09.2011
Abstract:
Climate change is expected to alter biotic interactions leading to temporal and spatial mismatches of interacting species. Especially, species with essential partners may suffer from spatial or temporal de-synchronisation. However, the implementation of biotic interactions in species distribution modelling is rarely taken into account and poses some challenges. Here, we examined potential impacts of climate change on the biotic interaction between three butterfly species (Gortyna borelii sp. lunata, Maculinea nausithous and Maculinea teleius) and their feeding plants (Peucedanum officinale and Sanguisorba officinalis) in Europe using an ensemble forecasting modelling technique (BIOMOD). We applied two different approaches of considering these biotic interactions in species distribution modelling: (1) an ‘explanatory variable approach’, modelling the potential future distribution of the butterfly with the projected current and future occurrence probability of the plant as additional explanatory variable beside climate, and (2) a ‘reference area approach’ modelling the current distribution of the butterfly in the current range of the plant (model fitting) and projecting its potential future occurrence probability on Europe. According to the models, the biotic interaction between the butterflies and their respective host plants tends to remain stable. The approaches differ in their predictive performance related to the AUC and in their span width concerning the projected range change between the different modelling algorithms. Climate change does not necessarily lead to future spatial mismatches between interacting species. Nevertheless, the temporal scale, which means in this case the provision of food resources at the time of reproduction, is not considered. For this reason, a temporal mismatch can occur beside spatial congruence.