CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 11Amphibian and Reptile BiologyEvolution and Paleontology StudiesSpecies Distribution and Climate Change

Is salamander arboreality limited by broad-scale climatic conditions?

Open access
Baken, Erica K., Mellenthin, Lauren E., Adams, Dean C.·2021·PLOS ONE
DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0255393PMC PMC8372966
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Identifying the historical processes that drive microhabitat transitions across deep time is of great interest to evolutionary biologists. Morphological variation can often reveal such mechanisms, but in clades with high microhabitat diversity and no concomitant morphological specialization, the factors influencing animal transitions across microhabitats are more difficult to identify. Lungless salamanders (family: Plethodontidae) have transitioned into and out of the arboreal microhabitat many times throughout their evolutionary history without substantial morphological specialization. In this study, we explore the relationship between microhabitat use and broad-scale climatic patterns across species’ ranges to test the role of climate in determining the availability of the arboreal microhabitat. Using phylogenetic comparative methods, we reveal that arboreal species live in warmer, lower elevation regions than terrestrial species. We also employ ecological niche modeling as a complementary approach, quantifying species-level pairwise comparisons of niche overlap. The results of this approach demonstrate that arboreal species on average display more niche overlap with other arboreal species than with terrestrial species after accounting for non-independence of niche model pairs caused by geographic and phylogenetic distances. Our results suggest that occupation of the arboreal microhabitat by salamanders may only be possible in sufficiently warm, low elevation conditions. More broadly, this study indicates that the impact of micro-environmental conditions on temporary microhabitat use, as demonstrated by small-scale ecological studies, may scale up dramatically to shape macroevolutionary patterns.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1371/journal.pone.0255393

Cites

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The limited latitudinal range of neotenic salamanders may be explained by the limited availability of their specialist habitat requirements.

    “the limited latitudinal range of neotenic salamanders may be explained by the limited availability of their specialist habitat requirements”

    From The neoteny goldilocks zone: The evolution of neoteny in <i>Ambystoma</i> (2024) · cites this paper as Baken et al., 2021

    The Introduction and Discussion support the general idea that habitat availability can be constrained by environmental conditions: the paper proposes that suitable climates limit arboreal microhabitat use in salamanders. It does not establish that neotenic salamanders have a limited latitudinal range or that their specialist habitat requirements explain it; those are a different group and geographic claim. (LLM, conf=0.77)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

No references could be resolved yet.

Research works printed but not linked: 55

  1. [1]Losos JB. The evolution of convergent structure in Caribbean Anolis communities. Syst Biol. 1992; 41(4): 403– 420.
  2. [2]Clack JA. An early tetrapod from ‘Romer’s Gap’. Nature 2002; 418: 72– 76. doi: 10.1038/nature00824 12097908 · DOI
  3. [3]Levin DA. Polyploidy and novelty in flowering plants. Am Nat. 1983; 122(1): 1– 25.
  4. [4]Baken EK, Adams DC. Macroevolution of arboreality in salamanders. Ecol Evol. 2019; 9: 7005– 7016. doi: 10.1002/ece3.5267 31380029 PMC6662381 · DOI
  5. [5]Blankers T, Adams DC, Wiens JJ. Ecological radiation with limited morphological diversification in salamanders. J Evol Biol. 2012; 25(4): 634– 646. doi: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2012.02458.x 22268991 · DOI
  6. [6]Constable H, Guralnick RP, Wieczorek J, Spencer C, Peterson AT. VertNet: A new model for biodiversity data sharing. PLoS Biol. 2010; 8: e1000309. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000309 20169109 PMC2821892 · DOI
  7. [7]Vernberg FJ. Hibernation studies of two species of salamander, Plethodon cinereus cinereus and Eurycea bislineata bislineata. Ecol. 1953; 34(1): 55– 62.
  8. [8]Caldwell RS. Observations on the winter activity of the red-backed salamander, Plethodon cinereus, in Indiana. Herpetologica 1975; 31: 21– 22.
  9. [9]Trauth SE, McCallum ML, Ball BJ, Hoffman VE. Plethodon caddoensis (Caddo Mountain Salamander) and Plethodon serratus (Southern Redback Salamander). Nocturnal Climbing Activity. Herpetol Rev. 2001; 32: 32– 32.
  10. [10]Camp CD, Wooten JA, Jensen JB, Bartek DF. Role of temperature in determining relative abundance in cave twilight zones by two species of lungless salamander (family Plethodontidae). Can J Zool. 2013; 92: 119– 127.
  11. [11]Farallo VR, Wier R, Miles DB. The Bogert effect revisited: salamander regulatory behaviors are differently constrained by time and space. Ecol Evol. 2018; 8: 11522– 11532. doi: 10.1002/ece3.4590 30598753 PMC6303756 · DOI
  12. [12]Farallo VR, Muñoz MM, Uyeda JC, Miles DB. Scaling between macro- to microscale climate data reveals strong phylogenetic inertia in niche evolution in plethodontid salamanders. Evol. 2020; 74(5): 979– 991. doi: 10.1111/evo.13959 32190909 · DOI
  13. [13]Baken EK, Mellenthin LE, Adams DC. Macroevolution of desiccation-related morphology in plethodontid salamanders as inferred from a novel surface area to volume ratio estimation approach. Evol. 2020; 74(2): 476– 486. doi: 10.1111/evo.13898 31849047 · DOI
  14. [14]Petranka JW. Salamanders of the United States and Canada. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press; 1998.
  15. [15]Clemente CJ, Withers PC, Thompson GG, Lloyd D. Lizard tricks: overcoming conflicting requirements of speed versus climbing ability by altering biomechanics of lizard stride. J Exp Biol. 2013; 216: 3854– 3862. doi: 10.1242/jeb.089060 23868836 · DOI
  16. [16]Higham TE, Korchari P, McBrayer LD. How to climb a tree: lizards accelerate faster, but pause more, when escaping on vertical surfaces. Biol J Linn Soc Lond. 2011; 102: 83– 90.
  17. [18]Riddell EA, Odom J, Damm J, Sears MW. Plasticity reveals hidden resistance to extinction under climate change in the global hotspot of salamander diversity. Sci Adv. 2018; 4: eaar5471. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aar5471 30014037 PMC6047487 · DOI
  18. [19]Riddell EA, Roback E, Wells CE, Zamudio KR, Sears MW. Thermal cues drive plasticity of desiccation resistance in a montane salamander with implications for climate change. Nat Commun. 2019; 10: 1– 12. 31501425 PMC6733842
  19. [20]Spotila JR, Berman EN. Determination of skin resistance and the role of the skin in controlling water loss in amphibians and reptiles. Comp Biochem Physiol. 1976; 55(A): 407– 411. doi: 10.1016/0300-9629(76)90069-4 9259 · DOI
  20. [22]McEntire KD. Arboreal ecology of Plethodontidae: A review. Copeia 2016; 104(1): 124– 131.
  21. [23]Currie DJ. Energy and large-scale patterns of animal- and plant-species richness. Am Nat. 1991; 137(1): 27– 49.
  22. [24]Kozak KH, Wiens JJ. Does niche conservatism promote speciation? A case study in North American Salamanders. Evol. 2006; 60: 2606– 2621. 17263120
  23. [25]Gomez-Rodriguez C, Baselga A, Wiens JJ. Is diversification rate related to climatic niche width? Glob Ecol Biogeogr. 2015; 24: 383– 395.
  24. [26]Rödder D, Engler JO. Quantitative metrics of overlaps in Grinnellian niches: advances and possible drawbacks. Glob Ecol Biogeogr. 2011; 20: 915– 927.
  25. [27]Gade MR, Peterman WE. Multiple environmental gradients influence the distribution and abundance of a key forest-health indicator species in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, USA. Landsc Ecol. 2019; 34(3): 569– 582.
  26. [28]McEntire KD, Maerz JC. Integrating ecophysiological and agent-based models to simulate how behavior moderates salamander sensitivity to climate. Front Ecol Evol. 2019; 7: 22.
  27. [29]Farallo VR, Miles DB. The Importance of Microhabitat: A Comparison of Two Microendemic Species of Plethodon to the Widespread P. cinereus. Copeia, 2016; 1: 67– 77.
  28. [30]Hijmans RJ, Cameron SE, Parra JL, Jones PG, Jarvis A. Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas. Int J Climatol. 2005; 25: 1965– 1978.
  29. [31]Title PO, Bemmels JB. ENVIREM: an expanded set of bioclimatic and topographic variables increases flexibility and improves performance of ecological niche modeling. Ecography 2018; 41: 291– 307.
  30. [32]Peterson AT, Nakazawa Y. Environmental data sets matter in ecological niche modelling: an example with Solenopsis invicta and Solenopsis richteri. Global Ecol Biogeogr. 2008; 17: 135– 144.
  31. [33]Collyer ML, Sekora DJ, Adams DC. A method for analysis of phenotypic change for phenotypes described by high-dimensional data. Heredity 2015; 115: 357– 365. doi: 10.1038/hdy.2014.75 25204302 PMC4815463 · DOI
  32. [34]Adams DC, Collyer ML. Phylogenetic ANOVA: Group-clade aggregation, biological challenges, and a refined permutation procedure. Evol. 2018; 72(6): 1204– 1215. 29682730
  33. [35]Collyer ML, Adams DC. RRPP: An R package for fitting linear models to high-dimensional data using residual randomization. Methods Ecol Evol. 2018; 9(2): 1772– 1779.
  34. [38]Legendre P, Legendre L. Numerical Ecology. Amsterdam: Elsevier; 2012.
  35. [39]Adams DC, Collyer ML. Phylogenetic comparative methods and the evolution of multivariate phenotypes. Annu Rev Ecol Evol Syst. 2019; 50: 17.1– 17.21.
  36. [40]Bonett RM, Blair AL. Evidence for complex life cycle constraints on salamander body form diversification. Proc Natl Acad Sci. 2017; 114: 9936– 9941. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1703877114 28851828 PMC5604006 · DOI
  37. [41]Shen XX, Liang D, Chen MY, Mao RL, Wake DB, Zhang P. Enlarged multilocus data set provides surprisingly younger time of origin for the Plethodontidae, the largest family of salamanders. Syst Biol. 2016; 65(1): 66– 81. doi: 10.1093/sysbio/syv061 26385618 · DOI
  38. [42]Phillips SJ, Dudík M, Schapire RE. A maximum entropy approach to species distribution modeling. Proceedings of the twenty-first international conference on Machine learning. 2004.
  39. [43]Phillips SJ, Anderson RP, Schapire RE. Maximum entropy modeling of species geographic distributions. Ecol Modell. 2006; 190(3–4): 231– 259.
  40. [45]Elith J, Graham CH, Anderson RP, Dudík M, Ferrier S, Guisan A, et al. Novel methods improve prediction of species distributions from occurrence data. Ecography 2006; 29: 129– 151.
  41. [46]Ortega-Huerta MA, Peterson AT. Modeling ecological niches and predicting geographic distributions: a test of six presence-only methods. Rev Mex Biodivers. 2008; 79: 205– 216.
  42. [47]Wisz MS, Hijmans RJ, Li J, Peterson AT, Graham CH, Guisan A, et al. Effects of sample size on the performance of species distribution models. Divers Distrib. 2008; 14: 763– 773.
  43. [48]Pearson RG, Raxworthy CJ, Nakamura M, Peterson AT. Predicting species distributions from small numbers of occurrence records: A test case using cryptic geckos in Madagascar. J Biogeogr. 2007; 34: 102– 117.
  44. [49]Warren DL, Glor RE, Turelli M. Environmental niche equivalency versus conservatism: quantitative approaches to niche evolution. Evol. 2008; 62(11): 2868– 2883. doi: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2008.00482.x 18752605 · DOI
  45. [50]Pebesma EJ, Bivand RS. Classes and methods for spatial data in R. R News 2005; 5(2): 9– 13.
  46. [51]Bivand RS, Pebesma E, Gomez-Rubio V. Applied spatial data analysis with R. 2nd ed. New York: Springer; 2013.
  47. [52]Paradis E, Schliep K. ape 5.0: an environment for modern phylogenetics and evolutionary analyses in R. Bioinformatics 2019; 35: 526– 528. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bty633 30016406 · DOI
  48. [53]Losos JB. Ecomorphology, performance capability, and scaling of West Indian Anolis lizards: an evolutionary analysis. Ecol Monogr. 1990; 60(3): 369– 388.
  49. [54]Anzai W, Omura A, Diaz AC, Kawata M, Endo H. Functional morphology and comparative anatomy of appendicular musculature in Cuban Anolis lizards with different locomotor habits. Zool Sci. 2014; 31(7): 454– 463. doi: 10.2108/zs130062 25001917 · DOI
  50. [55]Wiens JJ. Speciation and ecology revisited: phylogenetic niche conservatism and the origin of species. Evol. 2004; 58(1): 193– 197. doi: 10.1111/j.0014-3820.2004.tb01586.x 15058732 · DOI
  51. [56]Kozak KH, Wiens JJ. Climatic zonation drives latitudinal variation in speciation mechanisms. Proc Royal Soc B. 2007; 274: 2995– 3003. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2007.1106 17895224 PMC2291165 · DOI
  52. [57]Kozak KH, Wiens JJ. Accelerated rates of climatic-niche evolution underlie rapid species diversification. Ecol Lett. 2010; 13: 1378– 1389. doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01530.x 20875038 · DOI
  53. [58]Kozak KH, Wiens JJ. Phylogeny, ecology, and the origins of climate-richness relationships. Ecol. 2012; 93(8): S167– S181.
  54. [59]Kozak KH, Wiens JJ. What explains patterns of species richness? The relative importance of climatic-niche evolution, morphological evolution, and ecological limits in salamanders. Ecol Evol. 2016; 6: 5940– 5949. doi: 10.1002/ece3.2301 27547367 PMC4983604 · DOI
  55. [60]Ficetola GF, Lunghi E, Canedoli C, Padoa-Schioppa E, Pennati R, Manenti R. Differences between microhabitat and broad-scale patterns of niche evolution in terrestrial salamanders. Sci Rep. 2018; 8: 10575. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-28796-x 30002477 PMC6043550 · DOI

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Baken, E. K., Mellenthin, L. E., & Adams, D. C.
Affiliations
  • Chatham University (US)
  • Yale University (US)
  • Iowa State University (US)
Corresponding author
  • Baken, Erica K.
  • Mellenthin, Lauren E.
  • Adams, Dean C.
ORCID
Venue
PLOS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Published
2021-08-18
Volume
16
Issue
8
Pages
e0255393
ISSN
1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0255393
PMC
PMC8372966
OpenAlex
W3193640466
Cited by
11
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 3
FWCI
0.92
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Iowa State University Digital Repository (Iowa State University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
us national science foundation (DEB-1556379)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Amphibian and Reptile Biology
  • Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Paleontology › Evolution and Paleontology Studies
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecological Modeling › Species Distribution and Climate Change
Keywords
Plethodontidae, arboreality, microhabitat use, macroevolution, niche overlap, altitude, temperature, phylogenetic comparative analysis, ecological niche modeling
MeSH terms
Animals, Climate, Biological Evolution, Phylogeny, Urodela, Caudata, Ecosystem

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review