Data: Ecological niche conservatism spurs diversification in response to climate change

The dataset contains the configuration and data used to perform the simulations and generate the figures for the paper titled "Ecological niche conservatism spurs diversification in response to climate change", which is going to be online on Nature Ecology &amp; Evolution soon.AbstractA longstanding debate has focused on the relationship between evolutionary innovation in ecological niches of species and rates of biological diversification of those species. As such questions across broad scales of time and space, short-term experiments or scattered fossil evidences are not feasible, and contrasting opinions have emerged: niche innovation might allow species to explore and colonize new geographic areas across which they could speciate, or niche conservatism might augment isolation of populations that could then undergo allopatric speciation. Here, we used an <i>in silico</i>, “virtual world” simulation approach to address these questions. First, we created biological worlds on global scale in which different types of niche evolution could and could not occur, and then examined the resulting virtual species assemblages in terms of levels and patterns of diversity. The outcome was clear: niche conservatism promotes biological diversification, whereas labile niches—whether adapting to conditions available or changing randomly—led to slower diversification rates. This outcome, in the context of burgeoning theoretical and empirical evidence for niche conservatism, provides a framework for understanding how Earth-life interactions produced such a diverse biota.<br>