Distance to native climatic niche margins explains establishment success of alien mammals

Olivier Broennimann (), Blaise Petitpierre, Mathieu Chevalier, Manuela González-Suárez, Jonathan M. Jeschke, Jonathan Rolland, Sarah M. Gray, Sven Bacher and Antoine Guisan
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Olivier Broennimann: University of Lausanne
Blaise Petitpierre: University of Lausanne
Mathieu Chevalier: University of Lausanne
Manuela González-Suárez: University of Reading
Jonathan M. Jeschke: Freie Universität Berlin
Jonathan Rolland: Laboratoire Evolution et Diversité Biologique, CNRS, Bâtiment 4R1
Sarah M. Gray: University of Fribourg
Sven Bacher: University of Fribourg
Antoine Guisan: University of Lausanne

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract One key hypothesis explaining the fate of exotic species introductions posits that the establishment of a self-sustaining population in the invaded range can only succeed within conditions matching the native climatic niche. Yet, this hypothesis remains untested for individual release events. Using a dataset of 979 introductions of 173 mammal species worldwide, we show that climate-matching to the realized native climatic niche, measured by a new Niche Margin Index (NMI), is a stronger predictor of establishment success than most previously tested life-history attributes and historical factors. Contrary to traditional climatic suitability metrics derived from species distribution models, NMI is based on niche margins and provides a measure of how distant a site is inside or, importantly, outside the niche. Besides many applications in research in ecology and evolution, NMI as a measure of native climatic niche-matching in risk assessments could improve efforts to prevent invasions and avoid costly eradications.

Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22693-0

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