Macroevolutionary dynamics of climatic niche space

How and why lineages evolve along niche space as they diversify and adapt to different environments is fundamental to evolution. Progress has been hampered by the difficulties of linking a comprehensive empirical characterization of species niches with flexible evolutionary models that describe their evolution. Consequently, the relative influence of external episodic and biotic factors remains poorly understood. Here we characterize species’ two-dimensional temperature and precipitation niche space occupied (i.e., species niche envelope) as complex geometries and assess their evolution across a large vertebrate radiation (all Aves) using a model that captures heterogeneous evolutionary rates on time-calibrated phylogenies. We find that extant birds coevolved from warm, mesic climatic niches into colder and drier environments and responded to the K-Pg boundary with a dramatic increase in disparity. Contrary to expectations of subsiding rates of niche evolution as lineages diversify, our results show that overall rates have increased steadily, with some lineages experiencing exceptionally high evolutionary rates, associated with colonization of novel niche spaces, and others showing niche stasis. Both competition- and environmental change-driven niche evolution transpire and result in highly heterogeneous rates near the present. Our findings share the limitations of all work based purely on extant taxa but highlight the growing ecological and conservation insights arising from the model-based integration of increasingly comprehensive and robust environmental and phylogenetic information.