Ecological specialization of lichen congeners with a strong link to Mediterranean-type climate: a case study of the genus <span class="italic">Solenopsora</span> in the Apennine Peninsula

Anna GUTTOVÁ; Zuzana FAČKOVCOVÁ; Stefano MARTELLOS; Luca PAOLI; Silvana MUNZI; Elena PITTAO; Silvia ONGARO

doi:10.1017/S0024282918000543

- Aa
- Aa

Volume 51, Issue 1
January 2019 , pp. 75-88

Ecological specialization of lichen congeners with a strong link to Mediterranean-type climate: a case study of the genus Solenopsora in the Apennine Peninsula

Anna GUTTOVÁ ^(a1), Zuzana FAČKOVCOVÁ ^(a1), Stefano MARTELLOS ^(a2), Luca PAOLI ^(a3), Silvana MUNZI ^(a4), Elena PITTAO ^(a2) and Silvia ONGARO ^(a2)...

- https://doi.org/10.1017/S0024282918000543
- Published online: 20 February 2019

Abstract

An ecological biogeographical perspective provides an understanding of the factors that shape the geographical distribution of organisms, their biodiversity and ecological speciation. Focusing on members of the lichen genus Solenopsora, which are strongly linked to a Mediterranean-type climate, we aimed to depict their environmental niches in the Apennine Peninsula. This area represents their ecological optima, as well as the biogeographical centre of distribution. On the basis of occurrences of Solenopsora congeners, we identified the key ecological factors that shape their environmental niches. Applying an ensemble approach, which merges the results of Random Forest, GLM and MaxEnt algorithms, suitability maps were developed. These are mainly influenced by geological substratum, temperature and precipitation. Occurrence of Solenopsora taxa seems to be mainly governed by low variability in diurnal temperature and tolerance to dryness, with precipitation in the range of 0–20 mm in the driest month and a minimum temperature of >5 °C in the coldest month. The sensitivity to diurnal temperature, an important indicator for climate change, suggests that the taxa confined to Mediterranean bioclimatic types (i.e. Solenopsora grisea, S. marina, S. olivacea subsp. olbiensis and S. olivacea subsp. olivacea) might be good indicators of climatic stability. The geological substratum was a strong limiting factor and separated the taxa into three groups: those growing on calcareous, siliceous and ultramafic substrata. Limited co-occurrence of species confined to one of the three categories suggests that the level of niche differentiation is on a microhabitat level. Accounting for ecological requirements, the taxa differ in their tolerance to sub-optimal conditions. The ecological niches of a sister subspecies pair with different reproduction strategies, fertile S. olivacea subsp. olivacea and sorediate S. olivacea subsp. olbiensis, overlap strongly. However, habitat suitability for S. olivacea subsp. olbiensis is greater in areas with higher precipitation in the driest month, whereas S. olivacea subsp. olivacea is more restricted to warmer and drier areas. We also report new regional records for Italy and the first records of S. cesatii in Serbia and Ukraine, and of S. liparina in Serbia.

Export citation

Request permission

Copyright

References

Hide All

Allouche, O., Tsoar, A. & Kadmon, R. (2006) Assessing the accuracy of species distribution models: prevalence, kappa and the true skill statistic (TSS). Journal of Applied Ecology 43: 1223–1232.

Anacker, B. L. & Strauss, S. Y. (2014) The geography and ecology of plant speciation: range overlap and niche divergence in sister species. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B 281: 20132980.

Araújo, M. B. & New, M. (2007) Ensemble forecasting of species distribution. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22: 42–47.

Attorre, F., De Sanctis, M., Farcomeni, A., Guillet, A., Scepi, E., Vitale, M., Pella, F. & Fasola, M. (2013) The use of spatial ecological modelling as a tool for improving the assessment of geographic range size of threatened species. Journal for Nature Conservation 21: 48–55.

Barbet-Massin, M., Jiguet, F., Albert, C. H. & Thuiller, W. (2012) Selecting pseudoabsences for species distribution models: how, where and how many? Methods in Ecology and Evolution 3: 327–338.

Bendiksby, M., Mazzoni, S., Jørgensen, M. H., Halvorsen, R. & Holien, H. (2014) Combining genetic analyses of archived specimens with distribution modelling to explain the anomalous distribution of the rare lichen Staurolemma omphalarioides: long-distance dispersal or vicariance? Journal of Biogeography 41: 2020–2031.

Boakes, E. H., McGowan, P. J. K., Fuller, R. A., Chang-qing, D., Clark, N. E., O’Connor, K. & Mace, G. M. (2010) Distorted views of biodiversity: spatial and temporal bias in species occurrence data. PLoS Biology 8: e1000385.

Braganza, K., Karoly, D. J. & Arblaster, J. M. (2004) Diurnal temperature range as an index of global climate change during the twentieth century. Geophysical Research Letters 31: L13217.

Cranfield, R. J. (2004) Lichen census of Western Australia. Nuytsia 15: 193–220.

Cutler, D. R., Edwards, T. C., Beard, K. H., Cutler, A., Hess, K. T., Gibson, J. & Lawler, J. J. (2007) Random forests for classification in ecology. Ecology 88: 2783–2792.

Devictor, V., Clavel, J., Julliard, R., Lavergne, S., Mouillot, D., Thuiller, W., Venail, P., Villéger, S. & Mouquet, N. (2010) Defining and measuring ecological specialization. Journal of Applied Ecology 47: 15–25.

Elith, J., Graham, C. H., Anderson, R. P., Dudik, M., Ferrier, S., Guisan, A., Hijmans, R. J., Huettmann, F., Leathwick, J. R., Lehmann, A., et al. (2006) Novel methods improve prediction of species’ distributions from occurrence data. Ecography 29: 129–151.

Elix, J. A. (2009) Additional lichen records from Australia 71. Australian Lichenology 65: 1–54.

Ellis, C. J., Coppins, B. J., Dawson, T. P. & Seaward, M. R. D. (2007) Response of British lichens to climate change scenarios: trends and uncertainties in the projected impact for contrasting biogeographic groups. Biological Conservation 140: 217–235.

Fačkovcová, Z., Senko, D., Svitok, M. & Guttová, A. (2017) Ecological niche conservatism shapes the distributions of lichens: geographical segregation does not reflect ecological differentiation. Preslia 89: 63–85.

Fady-Welterlen, B. (2005) Is there really more biodiversity in Mediterranean forest ecosystems? Taxon 54: 905–910.

Favero-Longo, S. E., Matteucci, E., Giordani, P., Paukov, A. G. & Rajakaruna, N. (2018) Diversity and functional traits of lichens in ultramafic areas: a literature-based worldwide analysis integrated by field data at the regional scale. Ecological Research 33: 593–608.

Galloway, D. J. (2008) Lichen biogeography. In Lichen Biology (T. H. Nash III, ed.): 315–335. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gaston, K. J. (1996) Species-range-size distributions: patterns, mechanisms and implications. Tree 11: 197–201.

Gilbert, O. L., Purvis, O. W. & James, P. W. (2009) Solenopsora. In The Lichens of Great Britain and Ireland (C. W. Smith, A. Aptroot, B. J. Coppins, A. Fletcher, O. L. Gilbert, P. W. James & P. A. Wolseley, eds): 842–844. London: British Lichen Society.

Guiot, J. & Cramer, W. (2016) Climate change: the 2015 Paris Agreement thresholds and Mediterranean basin ecosystems. Science 354: 465–468.

Guisan, A., Broennimann, O., Engler, R., Vust, M., Yoccoz, N. G., Lehmann, A. & Zimmermann, N. E. (2006) Using niche-based models to improve the sampling of rare species. Conservation Biology 20: 501–511.

Guttová, A. & Lőkös, L. (2011) Leptogium ferax (lichen-forming fungi, Collemataceae) new to Hungary. Acta Botanica Hungarica 53: 321–324.

Guttová, A., Zozomová-Lihová, J., Timdal, E., Kučera, J., Slovák, M., Piknová, K. & Paoli, L. (2014) First insights into genetic diversity and relationships of European taxa of the genus Solenopsora (Catillariaceae, Ascomycota) with implications on their delimitation. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 176: 203–223.

Guttová, A., Vondrák, J., Schultz, M., El Mokni, R. (2015) Lichens collected during the 12th “Iter Mediterraneum” in Tunisia, 24 March – 4 April 2014. Bocconea 27: 69–77.

Harrell, F. E. Jr, with contributions from Charles Dupont and many others. (2016) Package “Hmisc”: Harrell Miscellaneous. R package version 4.0-2. [WWW document] URL https://cran.r-project.org/package=Hmisc.

Heads, M. (2015) The relationship between biogeography and ecology: envelopes, models, predictions. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 115: 456–468.

Hijmans, R. J. & van Etten, J. (2012) Geographic analysis and modeling with raster data. R package version 2.0-12. [WWW document] URL https://cran.r-project.org/package=raster.

Hijmans, R. J., Cameron, S. E., Parra, J. L., Jones, P. G. & Jarvis, A. (2005) Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas. International Journal of Climatology 25: 1965–1978.

Incerti, G. & Nimis, P. L. (2006) Biogeographical outline of epiphytic lichens in a Mediterranean area: Calabria (S Italy). Lichenologist 38: 355–371.

Kassambara, A. & Mundt, F. (2017) factoextra: extract and visualize the results of multivariate data analyses. [WWW document] URL http://www.sthda.com/english/rpkgs/factoextra.

Komposch, H. & Breuss, O. (2013) Erstnachweise lichenisierter und nich-lichenisierter Pilze für Kärnten, die Steiermark, Niederösterreich und Österreich. Karinthia II 203/123: 495–506.

Lê, S., Josse, J. & Husson, F. (2008) FactoMineR: an R package for multivariate analysis. Journal of Statistical Software 25: 1–18.

Leavitt, S. D. & Lumbsch, H. T. (2016) Ecological biogeography of lichen-forming fungi. In Environmental and Microbial Relationships, The Mycota IV, 3rd Edition (I. S. Druzhinina & C. P. Kubicek, eds): 15–37. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Lendemer, J. C. & Hodkinson, B. P. (2013) A radical shift in the taxonomy of Lepraria s.l.: molecular and morphological studies shed new light on the evolution of sexuality and lichen growth form diversification. Mycologia 105: 994–1018.

Martellos, S., Attore, F., Farcomeni, A., Francesconi, F., Pittao, E. & Tretiach, M. (2014) Species distribution models backing taxa delimitation: the case of the lichen Squamarina cartilaginea in Italy. Flora 209: 698–703.

McCarthy, P. M. (2013) Checklist of the Lichens of Australia and its Island Territories. Australian Biological Resources Study, Canberra. Version 29 June 2013. [WWW document] URL http://www.anbg.gov.au/abrs/lichenlist/introduction.html.

McCarthy, P. & Elix, J. A. (2017) Five new lichen species (Ascomycota) and a new record from southern New South Wales, Australia. Telopea 20: 335–353.

Mered’a, P., Kučera, J., Marhold, K., Senko, D., Slovák, M., Svitok, M., Šingliarová, B. & Hodálová, I. (2016) Ecological niche differentiation between tetra- and octoploids of Jacobaea vulgaris . Preslia 88: 113–136.

Merow, C., Smith, M. J. & Silander, J. A. (2013) A practical guide for modelling species distributions: what it does, and why inputs and settings matter. Ecography 36: 1058–1069.

Miadlikowska, J., Kauff, F., Högnabba, F., Oliver, J. C., Molnár, K., Fraker, E., Gaya, E., Hafellner, J., Hofstetter, V., Gueidan, C., et al. (2014) A multigene phylogenetic synthesis for the class Lecanoromycetes (Ascomycota): 1307 fungi representing 1139 infrageneric taxa, 317 genera and 66 families. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 79: 132–168.

Monge-Nájera, J. (2008) Ecological biogeography: a review with emphasis on conservation and the neutral model. Gayana 72: 102–112.

Myers, N., Mittermeier, R. A., Mittermeier, C. G., da Fonseca, G. A. B. & Kent, J. (2000) Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities. Nature 403: 853–858.

Nieto Feliner, G. (2014) Patterns and processes in plant phylogeography in the Mediterranean Basin. A review. Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics 16: 265–278.

Nimis, P. L. (2016) The Lichens of Italy. A Second Annotated Catalogue. Trieste: EUT (Edizioni Università di Trieste).

Nimis, P. L. & Martellos, S. (2017) ITALIC 5.0, the information system on Italian lichens. Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste. [WWW document] URL http://dryades.units.it/italic.

Otte, V., Esslinger, T. L. & Litterski, B. (2002) Biogeographical research on European species of the lichen genus Physconia . Journal of Biogeography 29: 1125–1141.

Peralta-Hernandez, A. R., Balling, R. C. Jr. & Barba-Martinez, L. R. (2009) Analysis of near-surface diurnal temperature variations and trends in southern Mexico. International Journal of Climatology 29: 205–209.

Petit, R. J., Hampe, A. & Cheddadi, R. (2005) Climate changes and tree phylogeography in the Mediterranean. Taxon 54: 877–885.

Phillips, S. J., Anderson, R. P. & Schapire, R. E. (2006) Maximum entropy modelling of species geographic distributions. Ecological Modelling 190: 231–259.

Planas, E., Saupe, E. E., Lima-Ribeiro, M. S., Peterson, A. T. & Ribera, C. (2014) Ecological niche and phylogeography elucidate complex biogeographic patterns in Loxosceles rufescens (Araneae, Sicariidae) in the Mediterranean Basin. BMC Evolutionary Biology 14: 195.

Poelt, J. & Krüger, U. (1970) Die Verbreitungsverhältnisse der Flechtengattung Squamarina in Europa. Feddes Repertorium 81: 187–201.

QGIS Development Team (2016) QGIS geographic information system, version “Las Palmas”. Open Source Geospatial Foundation. [WWW document] URL http://qgis.osgeo.org.

Qu, M., Wan, J. & Hao, X. (2014) Analysis of diurnal air temperature range change in the continental United States. Weather and Climate Extremes 4: 86–95.

R Core Team (2016) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Version 3.3.3. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. [WWW document] URL http://www.R-project.org.

Rivas-Martínez, S., Rivas Sáenz, S. & Penas, A. (2011) Worldwide bioclimatic classification system. Global Geobotany 1: 1–634 + 4 Maps.

Rödder, D. & Engler, J. O. (2011) Quantitative metrics of overlaps in Grinnellian niches: advances and possible drawbacks. Global Ecology and Biogeography 20: 915–927.

Rubio-Salcedo, M., Psomas, A., Prieto, M., Zimmermann, N. E. & Martínez, I. (2017) Case study of the implications of climate change for lichen diversity and distributions. Biodiversity and Conservation 26: 1121–1141.

Ryan, B. D. & Timdal, E. (2002) Solenopsora . In Lichen Flora of the Greater Sonoran Desert Region, Vol. 1. (T. H. Nash III, B. D. Ryan, C. Gries & F. Bungartz, eds): 462–465. Tempe, Arizona: Lichens Unlimited, Arizona State University.

Sammy, N. (1989) Checklist of western Australian lichens. Mycotaxon 35: 417–428.

Santiso, X., Lopez, L., Retuerto, R. & Barreiro, R. (2016) Phylogeography of a widespread species: pre-glacial vicariance, refugia, occasional blocking straits and long-distance migrations. AoB PLANTS 8: plw003.

Schoener, T. W. (1968) The Anolis lizards of Bimini: resource partitioning in a complex fauna. Ecology 49: 704–726.

Serra-Diaz, J. M., Ninyerola, M. & Lloret, F. (2012) Coexistence of Abies alba (Mill.) – Fagus sylvatica (L.) and climate change impact in the Iberian Peninsula: a climatic-niche perspective approach. Flora 207: 10–18.

Thompson, J. D., Lavergne, S., Affre, L., Gaudeul, M. & Debussche, M. (2005) Ecological differentiation of Mediterranean endemic plants. Taxon 54: 967–976.

Thuiller, W., Lafourcade, B., Engler, R. & Araùjo, M. B. (2009) BIOMOD – a platform for ensemble forecasting of species distributions. Ecography 32: 369–373.

Thuiller, W., Georges, D., Engler, R. & Breiner, F. (2016) Biomod2: ensemble platform for species distribution modeling. R package version 3.3-7. [WWW document] URL https://cran.r-project.org/package=biomod2.

van der Wal, J., Falconi, L., Januchowski, S., Shoo, L. & Storlie, C. (2014) SDMTools – Species distribution modelling tools: tools for processing data associated with species distribution modelling exercises. R package version 1.1-221. [WWW document] URL https://cran.r-project.org/package=SDMTools.

Warren, D. L., Glor, R. E. & Turelli, M. (2008) Environmental niche equivalency versus conservatism: quantitative approaches to niche evolution. Evolution 62: 2868–2883.

Wiersma, Y. F. & Skinner, R. (2011) Predictive distribution model for the boreal felt lichen Erioderma pedicellatum in Newfoundland, Canada. Endangered Species Research 15: 115–127.

Williams, J. N., Seo, C., Thorne, J., Nelson, J. K., Erwin, S., O’Brien, J. M. & Schwartz, M. W. (2009) Using species distribution models to predict new occurrences for rare plants. Diversity and Distributions 15: 565–576.

Youssef, S., Baumel, A., Véla, E., Juin, M., Dumas, E., Affre, L. & Tatoni, T. (2011) Factors underlying the narrow distribution of the Mediterranean annual plant Arenaria provincialis (Caryophyllaceae). Folia Geobotanica 46: 327–350.

Type	Description	Title
WORD	Supplementary materials	Guttová et al. supplementary material Guttová et al. supplementary material 1 Word (56.7 MB)	56.7 MB
WORD	Supplementary materials	Guttová et al. supplementary material Guttová et al. supplementary material 2 Word (19 KB)	19 KB

Metrics

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0

Total number of PDF views: 0 *

Loading metrics...

Abstract views

Total abstract views: 0 *

Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between <date>. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed

Ecological specialization of lichen congeners with a strong link to Mediterranean-type climate: a case study of the genus Solenopsora in the Apennine Peninsula

CAPTCHA *

Keywords

Metrics

Full text views Full text views reflects the number of PDF downloads, PDFs sent to Google Drive, Dropbox and Kindle and HTML full text views.

Abstract views Abstract views reflect the number of visits to the article landing page.

Full text views

Abstract views