New paper in Regional Environmental Change

Elevational range shifts among Bombina toad populations in the Alps in response to future climate change
Igor Boyer, Alain Pagano, Francis Isselin-Nondedeu, Romain Bertrand

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-024-02352-y 

Abstract : The ability of species to cope with climate change depends on both intrinsic and extrinsic factors, for instance dispersal ability and landscape composition. Nevertheless, populations can also differ in their ability to track the shift of suitable areas due to traits developed in response to local environmental pressures. In the south-west part of the distribution area of the yellow-bellied toad (Bombina variegata), two divergent ecotypes, named fast and slow, can be identified along a gradient of anthropization. We investigate the ability of these ecotypes to track the altitudinal shift of suitable habitat in the French Alps at the horizon 2100. First, we modelled future climatic suitability in the Alps according to climatic scenarios, and then we used a process-based model simRShift, to simulate the demographic and colonisation processes in the future accounting for the traits of each ecotype. The fast ecotype may not persist and colonise as many habitats compared to the slow ecotype (e.g. 872.3km2 and 4200.2 km2 under the optimistic scenario in 2100 for the GFDL-ESM4 GCM respectively for fast and slow). We explain these results by the shorter lifespan of the fast ecotype that makes it more vulnerable to stochasticity.