Climate change increases ecogeographic isolation between closely related plants

1. Ecogeographic isolation is a fundamental prezygotic barrier to reproduction and a step toward diversification in flowering plants. However, whether ecogeographic isolation acts as a reproductive barrier between species and thus as a mechanism for species divergence is unclear and is expected to change as species distributions shift under climate change.
2. Using a Maxent framework, we quantified the extent of ecogeographic isolation of nine closely related species of the European plant genus Pulmonaria, which lack pre-mating barriers and often form hybrids. We investigated ecogeographic isolation under both current conditions and four climate change scenarios; two unrelated future climate models, each with two predictions of the potential trajectories of climate change.
3. Compared with current climates, under these future climate scenarios, there will be an increase in mean annual temperature, but not in mean annual precipitation in the range of Pulmonaria throughout Europe. This ...