Vertebrate responses to human land use are influenced by their proximity to climatic tolerance limits

Aim: Land-use change leads to local climatic changes, which can induce shifts in community composition. Indeed, human-altered land uses favour species able to tolerate greater temperature and precipitation extremes. However, environmental changes do not impact species uniformly across their distributions, and most research exploring the impacts of climatic changes driven by land use has not considered potential within-range variation. We explored whether a population’s climatic position (the difference between species’ thermal and precipitation tolerance limits and the environmental conditions a population experiences) influences their relative abundance across land-use types.

Location: Global

Methods: Using a global dataset of terrestrial vertebrate species and estimating their realised climatic tolerance limits, we analysed how the abundance of species within human-altered habitats relative to that in natural habitats varied across different climatic positions (controlling for p...