Recent community warming of moths in Finland is driven by extinction in the north and colonisation in the south

As the climate warms, species are shifting their ranges to match their climatic niches, leading to \"thermophilisation\" of ecological communities. We currently have little understanding of the population-level processes driving this community-level warming, particularly at rapidly warming high latitudes. Using 30 years of high-resolution moth monitoring data across a 1,200 km latitudinal gradient in Finland, we found that higher latitude communities are experiencing more rapid thermophilisation. We attribute this spatial variation to community-wide colonisation-extinction dynamics, both for the full community and for different thermal affinity groups. Our findings reveal that latitudinal variation in the pathways underpinning thermophilisation is the net outcome of opposite forces: In the north, community warming is driven by the extinction of cold-affiliated species, while in the south, it is driven by high colonisation rates of warm-affiliated species. Thus, we show how species' therma..., , , Author: Emilie E. Ellis

Contact: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

Date: June 2025

Summary:

Here we have the core analysis for the manuscript ‘Recent community warming of moths in Finland is driven by extinction in the north and colonisation in the south’. There are 2 scripts included, script 1 (‘1_overall_script_final.R) is the core script that runs through every step of the analysis. A separate script, 2_MLE_thermal_groups.R is the core analysis of the manuscript but it takes about 3 days to run. 

The following folder structure should be be followed:

Ellis_et_al_full_analysis should contain two folders: dataframes and scripts.

1\. Data frames: 

**‘Ellis_et_al_full_analysis/data_frames_organised/‘** will contains the following files:

1\) Ellis_et_al_full_analysis/data_frames_organised/**1_STI_data_cleaned.csv**

*Description:* The mean species temperature index per species. This also contains the correct synonyms for each moth species to match the mot...,