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. 2012 Sep 18;109(38):15141-5.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1200844109. Epub 2012 Sep 4.

Biodiversity tracks temperature over time

Peter J Mayhew  1 , Mark A Bell, Timothy G Benton, Alistair J McGowan
Affiliations

Biodiversity tracks temperature over time

Peter J Mayhew et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

The geographic distribution of life on Earth supports a general pattern of increase in biodiversity with increasing temperature. However, some previous analyses of the 540-million-year Phanerozoic fossil record found a contrary relationship, with paleodiversity declining when the planet warms. These contradictory findings are hard to reconcile theoretically. We analyze marine invertebrate biodiversity patterns for the Phanerozoic Eon while controlling for sampling effort. This control appears to reverse the temporal association between temperature and biodiversity, such that taxonomic richness increases, not decreases, with temperature. Increasing temperatures also predict extinction and origination rates, alongside other abiotic and biotic predictor variables. These results undermine previous reports of a negative biodiversity-temperature relationship through time, which we attribute to paleontological sampling biases. Our findings suggest a convergence of global scale macroevolutionary and macroecological patterns for the biodiversity-temperature relationship.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Associations between tropical sea surface temperature and estimates of marine invertebrate richness, shown both through time series plots (A and C, N = 51) and through correlations between those time series (B and D), respectively. Time series show temperature (black circles) and standing richness (white and gray circles) for boundary crossers in Sepkoski’s compendium (A) and using item quota subsampling (C). Gray circles on all plots are the five mass extinctions of ref. . The residuals plotted are mean-standardized, after detrending following data transformation where necessary.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Associations between tropical sea surface temperature and estimates of marine invertebrate origination rate (A and B) and extinction rate (C and D), shown both through time series plots (A and C, N = 51) and through correlations between those time series (B and D), respectively. Time series show temperature (black circles) and origination or extinction rates (white and gray circles), using the variables λ and μ from ref. . Gray circles on all plots are the five mass extinctions of ref.  (C) or rebounds from them (A). The extinction data in D are lagged by10 Myr. The residuals plotted are mean-standardized, after detrending following data transformation where necessary.
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