Climate change alters global invasion vulnerability among ecoregions

Aim: We assess climate similarity among global freshwater and terrestrial ecoregions under historical and future climate scenarios to determine where climate change will impact the climate filter of invasion process.

Location: Global.

Methods: We used the Climatch algorithm to conduct a climate-match analysis to quantify the climate similarity between freshwater and terrestrial ecoregions of the world. Climate match was modelled between all freshwater and terrestrial ecoregions. The analysis was conducted under historical climates and projected climates of 2090 under three shared-socioeconomic pathways SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0, SSP5-8.5. Climate matches of each ecoregion were presented as mean climate match to all other ecoregions. Friedman’s non-parametric rank sum two-way analysis of variance with repeated measures was used to examine differences in climate match between climate scenarios. 

Methods
The original datasets were accessed from publicly available sources.

Biogeographic spatial units:

Freshwater ecoregions of the world (Abell et al. 2008)
Terrestrial ecoregions of the world (Olson et al. 2001)

Climate data:
Worldclim.org (Fick, S.E. and R.J. Hijmans, 2017) - Accessed December 2020.

Climate matching:
Climate match was computed between all ecoregions both as recipients and sources for each freshwater and terrestrial set, under historical and projected future climate conditions. The "Climatch" algorithm (Pheloung 1996; Crombie et al. 2008) was used.