Publications

To read more about our research, see the Research Projects area of this website. For a full publication list since the group moved to iDiv in October 2024, see below after this top ten selection.

In the publication lists, names of current or former team members are highlighted in bold.

Macroecology, Macroevolution, and Biogeography: the Big Picture

We found that paleoclimatic change did not drive the speed of change in climatic niches in a group of Old-World flycatchers (65 species of the bird family Muscicapidae) over the last 17 million years. However, cooler temperatures caused faster changes in temperature niche in the birds, but only when using one of two datasets of reconstructed paleoclimate: Eyres, A., J. T. Eronen, O. Hagen, K. Böhning-Gaese, S. A. Fritz (2021) Climatic effects on niche evolution in a passerine bird clade depend on paleoclimate reconstruction method. Evolution 75: 1046-1060.

In this comparative study of over 500 species, we demonstrated that morphological traits can evolve differently in migratory vs. sedentary bird species, supporting different evolutionary selection regimes even in quite closely related species. For example, migratory species across multiple lineages in five of eight tested groups consistently evolved more pointed wings than sedentary species, presumably because more pointed wings cause lower energy consumption during long-distance flight: Phillips, A. G., T. Töpfer, K. Böhning-Gaese, S. A. Fritz (2018) Evidence for distinct evolutionary optima in the morphology of migratory and resident birds. Journal of Avian Biology. 49: e01807.

We reviewed how geology and climate shape biodiversity in mountains, and demonstrated the effects of climate, topographic relief, heterogeneity of soil types, and erosion rates on the number of terrestrial vertebrate species occurring in mountain ranges across the world: Antonelli, A., W. D. Kissling, S. G. A. Flantua, M. A. Bermúdez, A. Mulch, A. N. Muellner-Riehl, H. Kreft, H. P. Linder, C. Badgley, J. Fjeldså, S. A. Fritz, C. Rahbek, F. Herman, H. Hooghiemstra, C. Hoorn (2018) Geological and climatic influences on mountain biodiversity. Nature Geoscience 11: 718-725.

This study identified 11 terrestrial zoogeographic realms across the globe, which contrasts to the classic six realms defined by A. R. Wallace in the 19^th century and used extensively since then. This contrast arises because our new analyses combined data on not only species’ geographic distributions but also on their phylogenetic relationships (>21,000 species of non-marine amphibians, birds, and mammals): Holt, B. G., J.-P. Lessard, M. K. Borregaard, S. A. Fritz, M. B. Araújo, D. Dimitrov, P.-H. Fabre, C. H. Graham, G. R. Graves, K. A. Jønsson, D. Nogués-Bravo, Z. Wang, R. J. Whittaker, J. Fjeldså, C. Rahbek (2013) An update of Wallace’s zoogeographic regions of the world. Science 339: 74-78.

Macroevolution and Paleobiology of Mammals

Our analysis of extensive mammalian fossil records for several groups showed that the changes in mammalian body size over time during the Neogene (ca. 23-2 million years ago) differed not only between the two continents of North America and Europe, but also between different dietary types, such as carnivores and herbivores: Huang, S., J. J. Saarinen, A. Eyres, J. T. Eronen & S. A. Fritz (2022) Mammalian body size evolution was shaped by habitat transitions as an indirect effect of climate change. Global Ecology and Biogeography 31: 2463-2474.

This review provided a conceptual framework for future interdisciplinary studies to test the effects of mountain building and climate change on biodiversity over long evolutionary timescales. The study also presented a case study, showing that the onset of surface uplift of the Central Anatolian Plateau ca. 11 million years ago in present-day Turkey coincided with a period of increased mammalian species turnover in the region: Huang, S., M. J. M. Meijers, A. Eyres, A. Mulch, S. A. Fritz (2019) Unravelling the history of biodiversity in mountain ranges through integrating geology and biogeography. Journal of Biogeography 46: 1777-1791.

This study revealed a significant relationship of mammalian fossil diversity with primary production of biomass from plants. This relationship existed through the Neogene (23 to 1.8 million years ago), but fundamentally changed until the present day because many large mammals went extinct during or since the ice ages, and because humans remove a large proportion of primary production from natural systems today: Fritz, S. A., J. T. Eronen, J. Schnitzler, C. Hof, C. M. Janis, A. Mulch, K. Böhning-Gaese, C. H. Graham (2016) Twenty-million-year relationship between mammalian diversity and primary productivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113: 10908-10913.

Past, Current, and Future Biodiversity – Macroecology and Conservation

Our study showed global trade-offs and conflicts among multiple conservation objectives for protected areas, such as biodiversity protection, ecosystem service provision, and climate change mitigation. We also provided a flexible and transparent decision support tool that allows weighting and prioritization of different objectives as well as real-time comparison of the outcome: Voskamp, A., S. A. Fritz, V. Köcke, M. F. Biber, T. Nogueira Brockmeyer, B. Bertzky, M. Forrest, A. Goldstein, S. Henderson, T. Hickler, C. Hof, T. Kastner, S. Lang, P. Manning, M. B. Mascia, I. R. McFadden, A. Niamir, M. Noon, B. O’Donnell, M. Opel, G. Schwede, P. West, C. Schenck, K. Böhning-Gaese (2023) Utilizing multi-objective decision support tools for protected area selection. One Earth 6: 1143-1156.

This modelling study showed the potential effects of ongoing climate change on the composition of local assemblages in birds, particularly on phylogenetic diversity, i.e. the evolutionary relatedness (or uniqueness) represented by species in a given place. We showed that climate-driven local species losses and particularly gains lead to profound phylogenetic restructuring of local assemblages across the globe, even in areas where no net change in species number is predicted: Voskamp, A., C. Hof, M. F. Biber, K. Böhning-Gaese, T. Hickler, A. Niamir, S. G. Willis & S. A. Fritz (2022) Projected climate change impacts on the phylogenetic diversity of the world’s terrestrial birds: more than species numbers. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 289: 20212184.

In this study, we used an elevational gradient in the Andes to test the relationships between species’ sensitivity to climate change and their ecological adaptive capacity in frugivorous birds. Whereas species’ climatic niche breadth increased with elevation, their trait-based dispersal ability and dietary niche breadth decreased with elevation, implying different responses of lowland and highland assemblages to future climate change: Nowak, L., M. Schleuning, I. M. A. Bender, W. D. Kissling & S. A. Fritz (2022) Independent variation of avian sensitivity to climate change and trait-based adaptive capacity along a tropical elevational gradient. Diversity and Distributions 28: 1123-1135.