Climatic niches in phylogenetic comparative studies: a review

Studying the evolution of climatic niches through time in a phylogenetic 12 comparative framework combines species distribution modeling with phylogenies. 13 Phylogenetic comparative studies aid the understanding of the evolution of species’ 14 environmental preferences by revealing the underlying evolutionary processes and causes, 15 detecting the differences among groups of species or relative to evolutionary pattern of other 16 phenotypic traits, but also act as a yardstick to gauge the adaptational potential under 17 climate change. Because several alternatives exist on how to compute and represent the 18 climatic niche, we here review and discuss the current state of the art and propose a best 19 practice to use in comparative studies. Moreover we outline the common evolutionary models 20 and available model-fitting methods and describe the procedure for ancestral niche 21 reconstruction with the intention to give a broad overview and highlight the most advanced 22 approaches for optimal niche-related comparative studies. 23 2 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/018796 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Apr. 30, 2015;