NCKU professor’s research on climatic variability published in Science - CNA
National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) professor Dr. I-Ching Chen, working with scientists from Academia Sinica, challenged the classic ecological hypothesis and proposed that long-term and short-term climatic variabilities affect species in opposite ways, according to a press release from the NCKU.
This finding provides a clear roadmap to understanding how species adapt to climatic variabilities, Chen said. The research was published in the journal Science on March 24.
The study challenged a well-known macrophysiological rule — Climatic Variability Hypothesis (CVH) — that suggests that greater variability selects for organisms with broader tolerances, enabling them to be geographically widespread.
"We bring a novel perspective that temporal scale actually matters and short-term climatic variability favors physiological specialism," said Chen.
She noted, "In fact, short-term variability, such as daily temperature range (DTR), dominates the majority of the earth surface but the ecological implication has seldom been discussed. It's very likely that there are more specialist species than we expected and they are particularly vulnerable to climate change."
Talking about her field research, Chen said, "We have investigated species distribution, breeding performance and competition along elevation gradients in Taiwan, using the burying beetle as example species. We found that daily temperature range is crucial to determining their range limits, hence range size, through changing species competition and breeding performance."
"However, DTR has seldom been covered in ecological theories and we wondered whether this finding could be generalized. That's why we started to investigate and re-examine the macrophysiological rule in determining species range size," she added.
Chen, whose research interests are global change biology, macroecology, and dendroclimatology, said, mechanistic understanding of species distribution and range shift is crucial to investigating biological responses under climate change.
The pattern of climatic variability features as large proportion the rapid scale of climate change, Chen noted, "and our findings will have important implications for not only fundamental ecology but also human well-being issues related to species distribution such as invasion and spread of vector-borne diseases."
Chen, a life sciences professor at NCKU, is currently leading a biology laboratory for climate change to explore issues on adaptive mechanism and altered species interactions under climate change, especially the vulnerability of tropical mountain cloud forests.
This finding provides a clear roadmap to understanding how species adapt to climatic variabilities, Chen said. The research was published in the journal Science on March 24.
The study challenged a well-known macrophysiological rule — Climatic Variability Hypothesis (CVH) — that suggests that greater variability selects for organisms with broader tolerances, enabling them to be geographically widespread.
"We bring a novel perspective that temporal scale actually matters and short-term climatic variability favors physiological specialism," said Chen.
She noted, "In fact, short-term variability, such as daily temperature range (DTR), dominates the majority of the earth surface but the ecological implication has seldom been discussed. It's very likely that there are more specialist species than we expected and they are particularly vulnerable to climate change."
Talking about her field research, Chen said, "We have investigated species distribution, breeding performance and competition along elevation gradients in Taiwan, using the burying beetle as example species. We found that daily temperature range is crucial to determining their range limits, hence range size, through changing species competition and breeding performance."
"However, DTR has seldom been covered in ecological theories and we wondered whether this finding could be generalized. That's why we started to investigate and re-examine the macrophysiological rule in determining species range size," she added.
Chen, whose research interests are global change biology, macroecology, and dendroclimatology, said, mechanistic understanding of species distribution and range shift is crucial to investigating biological responses under climate change.
The pattern of climatic variability features as large proportion the rapid scale of climate change, Chen noted, "and our findings will have important implications for not only fundamental ecology but also human well-being issues related to species distribution such as invasion and spread of vector-borne diseases."
Chen, a life sciences professor at NCKU, is currently leading a biology laboratory for climate change to explore issues on adaptive mechanism and altered species interactions under climate change, especially the vulnerability of tropical mountain cloud forests.
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