GlobTherm, a global database on thermal tolerances for aquatic and terrestrial organisms

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Abstract

How climate affects species distributions is a longstanding question receiving renewed interest owing to the need to predict the impacts of global warming on biodiversity. Is climate change forcing species to live near their critical thermal limits? Are these limits likely to change through natural selection? These and other important questions can be addressed with models relating geographical distributions of species with climate data, but inferences made with these models are highly contingent on non-climatic factors such as biotic interactions. Improved understanding of climate change effects on species will require extensive analysis of thermal physiological traits, but such data are both scarce and scattered. To overcome current limitations, we created the GlobTherm database. The database contains experimentally derived species’ thermal tolerance data currently comprising over 2,000 species of terrestrial, freshwater, intertidal and marine multicellular algae, plants, fungi, and animals. The GlobTherm database will be maintained and curated by iDiv with the aim to keep expanding it, and enable further investigations on the effects of climate on the distribution of life on Earth.

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Most cited references 17

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On the relationship between niche and distribution

H.R. Pulliam (2000)

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HOW MANY SPECIES OF ALGAE ARE THERE?

Michael Guiry (2012)

Algae have been estimated to include anything from 30,000 to more than 1 million species. An attempt is made here to arrive at a more accurate estimate using species numbers in phyla and classes included in the on-line taxonomic database AlgaeBase (http://www.algaebase.org). Despite uncertainties regarding what organisms should be included as algae and what a species is in the context of the various algal phyla and classes, a conservative approach results in an estimate of 72,500 algal species, names for 44,000 of which have probably been published, and 33,248 names have been processed by AlgaeBase to date (June 2012). Some published estimates of diatom numbers are of over 200,000 species, which would result in four to five diatom species for every other algal species. Concern is expressed at the decline and potential extinction of taxonomists worldwide capable of improving and completing the necessary systematic studies.

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Is Open Access

Languages Are Still a Major Barrier to Global Science

Tatsuya Amano, Juan P. González-Varo, William J. Sutherland (2016)

While it is recognized that language can pose a barrier to the transfer of scientific knowledge, the convergence on English as the global language of science may suggest that this problem has been resolved. However, our survey searching Google Scholar in 16 languages revealed that 35.6% of 75,513 scientific documents on biodiversity conservation published in 2014 were not in English. Ignoring such non-English knowledge can cause biases in our understanding of study systems. Furthermore, as publication in English has become prevalent, scientific knowledge is often unavailable in local languages. This hinders its use by field practitioners and policy makers for local environmental issues; 54% of protected area directors in Spain identified languages as a barrier. We urge scientific communities to make a more concerted effort to tackle this problem and propose potential approaches both for compiling non-English scientific knowledge effectively and for enhancing the multilingualization of new and existing knowledge available only in English for the users of such knowledge.

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Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Sci Data

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Sci Data

Title: Scientific Data

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group

ISSN (Electronic): 2052-4463

Publication date (Electronic): 13 March 2018

Publication date Collection: 2018

Volume: 5

Electronic Location Identifier: 180022

Affiliations

[1 ]German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Germany .

[2 ]Institute of Biology/Geobotany & Botanical Garden, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg , Halle (Saale) 06108, Germany.

[3 ]Département de Biologie, Chimie et Géographie, Université du Québec à Rimouski , Rimouski, QC G5L 3A1, Canada.

[4 ]Centre for Invasion Biology, Department of Botany and Zoology, Stellenbosch University, Private Bag X1, Matieland 7602 , South Africa.

[5 ]Department of Biology and Geology, Physics & Inorganic Chemistry, Rey Juan Carlos University , 28933, Móstoles, Spain.

[6 ]Biodiversity Research Centre, University of British Columbia , Vancouver, BC, Canada.

[7 ]Earth to Ocean Research Group, Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University , Burnaby, Canada.

[8 ]School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK .

[9 ]Department of Biogeography and Global Change, National Museum of Natural Sciences, CSIC, Calle Jose Gutierrez Abascal, 2 , 28006, Madrid, Spain.

[10 ]Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen , Copenhagen Ø, Denmark.

[11 ]Centre for Biodiversity and Genetic Resources, CIBIO, University of Évora, Largo dos Colegiais , 7000 Évora, Portugal.

[12 ]Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Irvine, CA 92697, USA.

[13 ]Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University , Lancaster LA1 4YQ, UK.

[14 ]Department Community Ecology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Permoserstraße 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany .

[15 ]Imperial College London, Silwood Park Campus , Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK.

[16 ]Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Swedish Species Information Centre , Box 7007, SE-750 07, Uppsala, Sweden.

[17 ]Departamento de Ecologia, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal de Goiás , Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil.

[18 ]Red de Biología Evolutiva, Instituto de Ecología, A.C. México .

[19 ]Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University , Boston, USA.

[20 ]Department of Life Sciences, University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, 28802, Spain .

Author notes

[a ] J.B. (email: joanne.bennett@ 123456idiv.de ).

[*]

These authors contributed equally to this work.

[]

J.M.B. collected all the data, contributed to the development of the data collection protocol, and led the data analysis and writing of the manuscript. P.C., contributed to the development of the data collection protocol and assisted in the writing of the manuscript. S.C.T., contributed to the development of the data collection protocol, assisted in the literature search and assisted in the writing of the manuscript. B.M. assisted in the literature search and in the writing of the manuscript. J.S. contributed to the development of the data collection protocol, assisted in the literature search and assisted in the writing of the manuscript. A.C.A. contributed to drafts of the manuscript. M.B.A. assisted in the writing of the manuscript. B.A.H. contributed to drafts of the manuscript. S.K. contributed to drafts of the manuscript. I.K. contributed to drafts of the manuscript. C.R. contributed to drafts of the manuscript. L.R. contributed to drafts of the manuscript. A.S. contributed to drafts of the manuscript. F.V. assisted in the writing of the manuscript. MAOT conceived the idea of developing the database, was a principle investigator on the project and contributed to the writing of the manuscript. I.M.C. conceived the idea of developing the database, was a principle investigator on the project and contributed to the writing of the manuscript.

Author information

Adam C. Algar http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8095-0097

Sally Keith http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9634-2763

Ingolf Kühn http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1691-8249

Fabricio Villalobos http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5230-2217

Article

Publisher Item ID: sdata201822

DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2018.22

PMC ID: 5848787

PubMed ID: 29533392

SO-VID: 084d4d3c-079c-496e-9977-23f74ef08550

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Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ applies to the metadata files made available in this article.

History

Date received : 01 March 2017

Date accepted : 08 December 2017

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GlobTherm, a global database on thermal tolerances for aquatic and terrestrial organisms

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Climate Change: Open Access

Most cited references 17

On the relationship between niche and distribution

HOW MANY SPECIES OF ALGAE ARE THERE?

Languages Are Still a Major Barrier to Global Science

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