Two often-overlooked predictors of marine species' distribution

The ocean is undergoing significant changes, including warming, acidification, and deoxygenation, which pose great challenges to marine biodiversity. However, most species distribution models projecting the impacts of climate change on marine species overlook predictor variables critically meaningful for species' ecologies such as pH and dissolved oxygen. Researchers in an international collaboration conducted a global comparative analysis to study the impact of incorporating predictor variables describing pH and dissolved oxygen into marine species distribution models. They used models trained for 268 cold-water coral species to project potential future distributions for different climate and dispersal scenarios over different time periods.
The research was led by Shuaishuai Liu and Bingqing Xiao from China, and Ákos Bede-Fazekas, assistant professor of our department was a co-author of the scientific paper presenting the results. In the D1-ranked journal "Limnology and Oceanography" they reported that, irrespective of scenario or period, models using pH and dissolved oxygen projected 11.5–21.4% higher impacts of climate change than those without them. Given the substantial differences in the predicted distribution patterns and the ecological importance of these variables, they concluded that researchers should consider more diverse set of predictor variables when predicting future range shifts for marine biodiversity assessments under climate change.