Predicting the in-between: Present and future habitat suitability of an intertidal euryhaline fish

• Published in: Ecological informatics 2022-05, Vol.68, p.101523, Article 101523
• Main Authors: Snead, Anthony A., Earley, Ryan L.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Climate change; Coastal; Geographic information systems; Habitat suitability; Niche modeling; Plasticity
• ISSN: 1574-9541
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101523

New World mangrove trees are foundation species, and their range is predicted to expand northward with climate change. Foundation species are commonly prioritized for conservation, with the goal of preserving the entire community that depends on them. However, no studies have explicitly investigated whether mangrove-dependent species' ranges will track the northward expansion of New World mangrove forests. We use the mangrove rivulus fish, Kryptolebias marmoratus, to investigate shifts in habitat suitability in response to various climate change scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways 2.6, 4.5, 6.0, and 8.5). Niche models for coastal species focus on traditional climatic variables (e.g., precipitation, temperature) even though coastal habitats also are directly influenced by marine variables (e.g., sea surface salinity). We employ a novel data integration method that combines marine and climatic variables, and that accounts for model selection uncertainty using model averaging to provide robust estimates of habitat suitability. Contrary to expectation, suitability of rivulus habitat is predicted to increase in the south and decrease or remain unchanged in the north across all climate change scenarios. Thus, rivulus might experience range contraction, not expansion. Habitat became more suitable with increased salinity of the saltiest month and precipitation of the driest quarter. In laboratory settings, rivulus have higher survival, reproductive success, and growth rates in low salinities. This discrepancy suggests that some combination of the responses of rivulus and its competitors to environmental change will restrict rivulus to habitats that laboratory experiments consider suboptimal. Our models suggest that focusing conservation decisions on foundation species could overestimate habitat availability and resilience of affiliated communities while simultaneously underestimating species declines and extinction risks. •Marine environmental variables drive intertidal species distributions.•Niche modeling of highly plastic species may parametrize community members' niche.•Coastal fish may not follow climate-change related foundation species range shifts.•Lab studies may not extend to nature due to multi-faceted environmental conditions.•Climate change rate drastically alters species distributions over short timescales.