Abstract
Global change is causing an unprecedented restructuring of ecosystems, with the spread of invasive species being a key driver. While population declines of native species due to invasives are well documented, much less is known about whether new biotic interactions reshape niches of native species. Here we quantify geographic range and realized-niche contractions in Australian frog species following the introduction of amphibian chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a pathogen responsible for catastrophic amphibian declines worldwide. We show that chytrid-impacted species experienced proportionately greater contractions in niche breadth than geographic distribution following chytrid emergence. Furthermore, niche contractions were directional, with contemporary distributions of chytrid-impacted species characterized by higher temperatures, lower diurnal temperature range, higher precipitation and lower elevations. Areas with these conditions may enable host persistence with chytrid through lower pathogenicity of the fungus and/or greater demographic resilience. Nevertheless, contraction to a narrower subset of environmental conditions could increase host vulnerability to other threatening processes and should be considered in assessments of extinction risk and during conservation planning. More broadly, our results emphasize that biotic interactions can strongly shape species realized niches and that large-scale niche contractions due to new species interactions—particularly emerging pathogens—could be widespread.
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Data availability
Raw niche variable values associated with the occurrence records of each species can be accessed at the Zenodo repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8088601. Metadata for each species and results for all niche analyses are in the Supplementary Data. Note, occurrence records for sensitive species are buffered to 10 km in most public databases (non-buffered records were obtained for these species under license for this work).
Code availability
R code to replicate the hypervolume, geographic distribution (EOO), niche metrics calculations and statistical analyses can be accessed at the Zenodo repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8088601
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Acknowledgements
B.C.S. was supported by The Australian Research Council through a Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE200100121). FrogID data were used with the permission of the Australian Museum.
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B.C.S. secured funding. B.C.S., R.P.D., G.W.H., M.C. and J.S. developed the study questions and design. B.C.S., G.W.H., G.R.G., C.J.H., M.M., D.N. and J.J.L.R. checked species records. J.S. and R.P.D. led analyses. B.C.S. wrote the first draft of the paper and all authors contributed substantially to revisions.
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Scheele, B.C., Heard, G.W., Cardillo, M. et al. An invasive pathogen drives directional niche contractions in amphibians. Nat Ecol Evol 7, 1682–1692 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02155-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02155-0
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