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Cited by 353

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 53 of the 53 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The evolution of critical thermal limits of life on Earth

Open access
Bennett, Joanne M., Sunday, Jennifer, Calosi, Piero, Villalobos, Fabricio, Martínez, Brezo, Molina-Venegas, Rafael, Araújo, Miguel B., Algar, Adam C., Clusella-Trullas, Susana, Hawkins, Bradford A., Keith, Sally A., Kühn, Ingolf, Rahbek, Carsten, Rodríguez, Laura, Singer, Alexander, Morales-Castilla, Ignacio, Olalla-Tárraga, Miguel Ángel·2021·Nature Communications

Abstract

Understanding how species’ thermal limits have evolved across the tree of life is central to predicting species’ responses to climate change. Here, using experimentally-derived estimates of thermal tolerance limits for over 2000 terrestrial and aquatic species, we show that most of the variation in thermal tolerance can be attributed to a combination of adaptation to current climatic extremes, and the existence of evolutionary ‘attractors’ that reflect either boundaries or optima in thermal tolerance limits. Our results also reveal deep-time climate legacies in ectotherms, whereby orders that originated in cold paleoclimates have presently lower cold tolerance limits than those with warm thermal ancestry. Conversely, heat tolerance appears unrelated to climate ancestry. Cold tolerance has evolved more quickly than heat tolerance in endotherms and ectotherms. If the past tempo of evolution for upper thermal limits continues, adaptive responses in thermal limits will have limited potential to rescue the large majority of species given the unprecedented rate of contemporary climate change.

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Metadata

Authors
Bennett, J. M., Sunday, J., Calosi, P., Villalobos, F., Martínez, B., Molina-Venegas, R., Araújo, M. B., Algar, A. C., Clusella-Trullas, S., Hawkins, B. A., Keith, S. A., Kühn, I., Rahbek, C., Rodríguez, L., Singer, A., Morales-Castilla, I., & Olalla-Tárraga, M. Á.
Venue
Nature Communications
Published
2021-02-19
Volume
12
Issue
1
Pages
1198-1198
ISSN
2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3132257869
Cited by
353
References
53
FWCI
30.45
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The evolution of critical thermal limits of life on Earth. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/s41467-021-21263-8
The paper
Bennett, J. M., Sunday, J., Calosi, P., Villalobos, F., Martínez, B., Molina-Venegas, R., Araújo, M. B., Algar, A. C., Clusella-Trullas, S., Hawkins, B. A., Keith, S. A., Kühn, I., Rahbek, C., Rodríguez, L., Singer, A., Morales-Castilla, I., & Olalla-Tárraga, M. Á. (2021). The evolution of critical thermal limits of life on Earth. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21263-8

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.