Logo image
Back
Climate and traits are differentially associated with range extent and range geometry in global butterflies
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Climate and traits are differentially associated with range extent and range geometry in global butterflies

Facheng Guo, Simon J. McKirdy, Lingling Gao and Guizhen Gao
Ecological indicators, Vol.189, 115231
2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2026.115231
pdf
Published4.68 MBDownloadView
Open Access CC BY-NC-ND V4.0

Abstract

Lepidoptera Model-based path decomposition Occurrence-derived footprints Phylogenetic multi-response model Range geometry
Range extent and range geometry describe complementary dimensions of species distributions, but their associations with climate and functional traits remain poorly resolved at global scale. We rebuilt occurrence-derived alpha-hull range footprints for global butterflies from 66.9 million selected GBIF records using occurrence cleaning, 10-km thinning and sampling-support diagnostics, yielding 6929 species with range metrics. We combined range metrics with footprint-level climate axes, trait axes and a Grafen topology-derived phylogeny in a phylogeny-linked multi-response path model for 5010 species. Climate axes showed stronger conditional associations with range extent, whereas trait axes showed stronger associations with range-shape elongation, with model comparison supporting the selected decomposition but not a causally identified path structure. Sampling, grid-threshold, PM-denominator, CTC/IND, climate-zone and nonlinearity diagnostics supported bounded interpretation while retaining explicit caveats for occurrence-derived footprints, model structure and uneven zonal sample sizes. These results distinguish climate-associated range extent from trait-associated range geometry in occurrence-derived butterfly footprints and may help generate hypotheses and prioritise independent validation or monitoring of range geometry under global change.

Details

Metrics

1 Record Views
Logo image