Range sizes and shifts of North American Pleistocene mammals are not consistent with a climatic explanation for extinction

Bibliographic Data

ID3919852
AuthorsBrigid Grund (University of Wyoming, corresponding author), Brigid S Grund, Todd A Surovell (0000-0001-6587-8621, University of Wyoming), Kathleen Lyons (0000-0001-5112-2508, Smithsonian Institution), S Kathleen Lyons
Year2012
Volume44
Issue1
Pages43-55
Publication date2012-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWorld Archaeology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-8243 • E-ISSN: 1470-1375
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00438243.2012.648427
OpenAlexW2156536675
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited52

The cause of the terminal Pleistocene extinctions in North America is debated but is most commonly ascribed to climate change or anthropogenic overkill. Based on contemporary extinction theory from conservation biology, we predict that in a climatically induced extinction event, species with small geographic ranges are most likely to suffer extinction. We use two methods to reconstruct Pleistocene range sizes for 194 taxa using data from the FAUNMAP database to conduct analyses in ArcGIS. Furthermore, because this extinction event was size selective, we reconstruct range shifts between the Pleistocene and Holocene for 157 species to assess whether climate change preferentially impacted extant large-bodied species. We find that the extinction event did not preferentially impact taxa with small geographic ranges, and that displacement distances were no different for large- and small-bodied species. These results are not consistent with an extinction induced by climate change but may be concordant with anthropogenic causes. Keywords: Pleistocene extinctionNorth Americaoverkillclimate changerange sizerange shiftGIS Notes Some scholars have argued that a small range size to body size ratio is the best predictor of extinction risk (e.g. Gaston and Blackburn 1996 Gaston, K. J. 2003. The Structure and Dynamics of Geographic Rages, New York: Oxford University [Google Scholar]; Lee and Jetz 2010 Lawler, J J., White, D., Neilson, R P. and Blaustein, A R. 2006. Predicting climate-induced range shifts: model differences and model reliability. Global Change Biology, 12: 1568–84. [Google Scholar]). Given that the terminal Pleistocene extinctions in North America were highly size selective (see Fig. 4), we worry that calculating any ratios of extinction prediction using body mass data will be confounded by the already statistically significant size selection of this event. There is a ubiquitous relationship between range size and extinction risk that has been established biologically and exists independent of body-size considerations, which is why we use range size rather than the range size/body size ratio as an extinction predictor in our analysis. Using an equal area projection probably contributes some error to our distance estimates. However, given the coarse-grained nature of the dataset and the large scale, we do not think is a problem

Biology · Climate change · Evolutionary biology · Extant taxon · Extinction (optical mineralogy · Extinction event · Geography · Holocene · Megafauna · Pleistocene · Population · Range (aeronautics · Taxon · Ecology · Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies · Geology · Paleontology · Species Distribution and Climate Change · Wildlife Ecology and Conservation