Projected climate change scenarios spatially decouple desert EFN-ant mutualisms

2025 · doi:10.32942/x2bh0w
preprint OA: closed CC-BY-NC-4.0
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The study examined how climate change would alter the geographic distributions and diversity of mutualistic assemblages in the Mojave and Colorado Deserts by modeling EFN-bearing plant communities and their associated ant communities using stacked species distribution models and projecting them under two future climate scenarios. It found that climate change decreased species richness in both EFN-bearing plants and ants and significantly reduced the geographic overlap between EFN plants and ant species under both scenarios, indicating vulnerability of the mutualism through spatial mismatch. Ant responses to climate varied by environmental generalization but not by evolutionary relationships, and including the EFN plant community as a predictor improved ants’ model performance; a major limitation noted is that data and code would be made available in the future. This paper does not explicitly discuss endometriosis or adenomyosis; it was included in the corpus via a keyword match in the upstream search index.

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Abstract

Aim: Climate change is changing species distributions globally, but predicting these impacts on assemblages and their spatial overlaps under future scenarios is an ongoing challenge. Here, we explore how climate change influences distributions among two mutualistic assemblages. Location: The Mojave and Colorado Deserts, California, United States Methods: We developed stacked species distribution models for the community of extrafloral nectar (EFN)-bearing plants and their mutualistic ant community and projected these models under two future climate scenarios. To assess the vulnerability of this mutualism due to spatial mismatches, we examined potential shifts in geographic overlap between the EFN-bearing plants and ant species under both scenarios. We analyzed the bioclimatic factors influencing species richness and distribution in both the plant and ant communities, as well as their responses to future climate change. We also tested whether environmental breadth and phylogeny could predict the responses of ants to climate change. Lastly, we evaluated the significance of the EFN community on ant species distributions by determining whether the inclusion of EFN plants in ant distribution models enhances their predictive accuracy. Results: The species richness of both the EFN-bearing plant communities and ant communities decreased under both predicted climate change scenarios. The geographic overlap between EFN plants and ants significantly decreased under both future scenarios. The response of different ant species to climate change varied based on their environmental generalization but not their evolutionary relationships. Including the EFN plant community as a predictor in the species distribution models for ants improved their predictive performance. Main conclusions: The EFN plant community is an important driver of their ant mutualists' geographic distribution and diversity. More environmentally generalized ant species benefit from the changing climate, whereas the EFN-bearing plants are uniformly and negatively impacted despite their environmental generalization. Despite the range increase of some ant species across the Mojave and Colorado Deserts, these mutualisms are vulnerable to climate change because of the decrease in geographic overlap between pairs of ant and EFN-bearing plant species.
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Abstract

Aim: Climate change is changing species distributions globally, but predicting these impacts on assemblages and their spatial overlaps under future scenarios is an ongoing challenge. Here, we explore how climate change influences distributions among two mutualistic assemblages. Location: The Mojave and Colorado Deserts, California, United States Methods: We developed stacked species distribution models for the community of extrafloral nectar (EFN)-bearing plants and their mutualistic ant community and projected these models under two future climate scenarios. To assess the vulnerability of this mutualism due to spatial mismatches, we examined potential shifts in geographic overlap between the EFN-bearing plants and ant species under both scenarios. We analyzed the bioclimatic factors influencing species richness and distribution in both the plant and ant communities, as well as their responses to future climate change. We also tested whether environmental breadth and phylogeny could predict the responses of ants to climate change. Lastly, we evaluated the significance of the EFN community on ant species distributions by determining whether the inclusion of EFN plants in ant distribution models enhances their predictive accuracy. Results: The species richness of both the EFN-bearing plant communities and ant communities decreased under both predicted climate change scenarios. The geographic overlap between EFN plants and ants significantly decreased under both future scenarios. The response of different ant species to climate change varied based on their environmental generalization but not their evolutionary relationships. Including the EFN plant community as a predictor in the species distribution models for ants improved their predictive performance. Main conclusions: The EFN plant community is an important driver of their ant mutualists' geographic distribution and diversity. More environmentally generalized ant species benefit from the changing climate, whereas the EFN-bearing plants are uniformly and negatively impacted despite their environmental generalization. Despite the range increase of some ant species across the Mojave and Colorado Deserts, these mutualisms are vulnerable to climate change because of the decrease in geographic overlap between pairs of ant and EFN-bearing plant species. DOI https://doi.org/10.32942/X2BH0W Subjects Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Keywords

ants, Mojave, Desert, climate change, SDM, mutualism, EFN Dates Published: 2025-02-21 05:32 Last Updated: 2025-08-14 03:46 Older Versions License CC-BY Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Additional Metadata Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: Data and code will be made available in the future Language: English

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