The relative influence of abiotic and biotic factors on suitable habitat of Old World fruit bats under current and future climate scenarios

Publication date: Available online 16 September 2019Source: Mammalian BiologyAuthor(s): N. Arumoogum, M.C. Schoeman, S. RamdhaniAbstractThere is growing evidence that biotic factors such as predator-prey interactions play significant roles in driving species distribution across large spatial scales. The relative influence of abiotic and biotic factors on species distribution, however, may change under climate change. We investigated the relative influence of abiotic and biotic variables on the potential current and future distributions of three fruit bat species, Epomophorus angolensis (Gray, 1870), E. wahlbergi (Sundevall, 1846) and Rousettus aegyptiacus (E. Geoffroy St.-Hilaire, 1810), in southern Africa. We tested three hypotheses, namely that bat species’ distribution is primarily driven by (1) productivity; (2) physiological tolerance to climate; and (3) biotic interactions, specifically fig distribution. We adopted an ensemble niche modelling approach to project the suitable habitat of fruit bat species for current and future climate scenarios, and assessed variable importance in the models using a randomised variable shuffle procedure. We predicted that both biotic and abiotic factors influence suitable habitat of fruit bats, the relative influence of factors on habitat suitability of bat species are taxon specific, and the relative influence of abiotic and biotic factors will change from current to future climate scenarios. Abiotic variables associated with producti...
Source: Mammalian Biology - Category: Biology Source Type: research