I am excited to let you know that we have put together a database of nearly 650,000 cactus occurrences belonging to almost 1,700 species. Data were contributed through BIEN (https://bien.nceas.ucsb.edu/bien/) which includes GBIF, a data-sharing agreement with iNaturalist, as well as individual parties (Pablo C. Guerrero and Marc A. Baker).
We aim to expand the assessments of climate change impacts using species distribution models for ~400 species published in 2022 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-022-01130-0). About 1,200 species currently meet the criteria for statistical modeling, though this number will decrease some following final manual curation and processing for the modeling workflow. All species and species with more than 10 occurrences can be seen here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1h3qhetF3vnPnmhqUGVq8tfxyAOmS9vYc. Beyond simply expanding the analyses, we seek to improve models by:
including soil variables (https://soilgrids.org/),
including variables related to drought events (provided through BioFI - https://bio2fi.github.io/),
switching to CMIP6 climate variables from CMIP5 (https://chelsa-climate.org/cmip6/).
The results from these models will be used to address several important issues of ecological, evolutionary, and conservation relevance. For a first paper, we'll seek to answer whether closely related species respond similarly to climate change. This question has been investigated with respect to phenology, but remains understudied in terms of range size responses. To answer this question, we'll be leveraging the most extensive species-level phylogeny for cacti to date, being built by Tania Hernandez-Hernandez. Given the high rate of endemism in cacti, many species suffer from a lack of occurrence data and/or can't be modeled using traditional methods. If closely related species respond similarly to climate change, we may be able to infer responses for species that can't currently be modeled.
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Potential future work includes:
- Diversification analyses, led by Beatriz Merino and Tania Hernandez,
- Assessing the potential of model results to inform IUCN Red List assessments,
- Optimizing conservation planning while accounting for range changes under climate change,
- Investigating the importance of accounting for infraspecific taxa when modeling distributional changes.
As traditional taxonomic platforms often lag behind the frequent taxonomic changes within Cactaceae, Brad Boyle and Brian Maitner adapted the purpose-built taxonomy from Cactaceae at Caryophyllales.org (https://caryophyllales.org/cactaceae/Checklist) to work with TNRS (https://tnrs.biendata.org/about/). This facilitated automated taxonomic standardization. Deviations from this scheme will only be possible in cases of recent publications that have not yet been included in Caryphyllales.org (e.g. for the Eriosyce curvispina complex).
Preliminary curation has already been performed using tools such as CoordinateCleaner (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/CoordinateCleaner/index.html). Given the size of the data set and the inclusion of community science records, we would like to rely on experts to do a rapid species-level review of occurrences based on interactive maps. Tania Hernandez-Hernandez, Beatriz Merino and I have worked out a workflow using Google Earth allowing for this. Please note that given the conservation status of many cacti and the impacts of illegal collection, no occurrence data may be shared without express written approval. This is also a condition of the agreement with iNaturalist.
For the moment, please let me know if you have any questions, and confirm you wish to participate in this project, including as co-author. If you are capable, please also suggest experts that may be willing to participate in the occurrence data review: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1665o0QvczD8KIIxk4YOXFKKbvN7_51PthgsUnfdQV6I/edit#gid=0.
Thank you,
Michiel Pillet