Global environmental predictors of benthic marine biogeographic structure. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Analyses of how environmental factors influence the biogeographic structure of biotas are essential for understanding the processes underlying global diversity patterns and for predicting large-scale biotic responses to global change. Here we show that the large-scale geographic structure of shallow-marine benthic faunas, defined by existing biogeographic schemes, can be predicted with 89-100% accuracy by a few readily available oceanographic variables; temperature alone can predict 53-99% of the present-day structure along coastlines. The same set of variables is also strongly correlated with spatial changes in species compositions of bivalves, a major component of the benthic marine biota, at the 1 grid-cell resolution. These analyses demonstrate the central role of coastal oceanography in structuring benthic marine biogeography and suggest that a few environmental variables may be sufficient to model the response of marine biogeographic structure to past and future changes in climate.

published proceedings

  • Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

altmetric score

  • 4

author list (cited authors)

  • Belanger, C. L., Jablonski, D., Roy, K., Berke, S. K., Krug, A. Z., & Valentine, J. W.

citation count

  • 102

complete list of authors

  • Belanger, Christina L||Jablonski, David||Roy, Kaustuv||Berke, Sarah K||Krug, Andrew Z||Valentine, James W

publication date

  • August 2012