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da Silva, C. R. B., and S. E. Diamond. 2024. Local climate change velocities and evolutionary history explain multidirectional range shifts in a North American butterfly assemblage. Journal of Animal Ecology 93: 1160–1171. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.14132

Species are often expected to shift their distributions either poleward or upslope to evade warming climates and colonise new suitable climatic niches. However, from 18‐years of fixed transect monitoring data on 88 species of butterfly in the midwestern United States, we show that butterflies are shifting their centroids in all directions, except towards regions that are warming the fastest (southeast).Butterflies shifted their centroids at a mean rate of 4.87 km year−1. The rate of centroid shift was significantly associated with local climate change velocity (temperature by precipitation interaction), but not with mean climate change velocity throughout the species' ranges.Species tended to shift their centroids at a faster rate towards regions that are warming at slower velocities but increasing in precipitation velocity.Surprisingly, species' thermal niche breadth (range of climates butterflies experience throughout their distribution) and wingspan (often used as metric for dispersal capability) were not correlated with the rate at which species shifted their ranges.We observed high phylogenetic signal in the direction species shifted their centroids. However, we found no phylogenetic signal in the rate species shifted their centroids, suggesting less conserved processes determine the rate of range shift than the direction species shift their ranges.This research shows important signatures of multidirectional range shifts (latitudinal and longitudinal) and uniquely shows that local climate change velocities are more important in driving range shifts than the mean climate change velocity throughout a species' entire range.

Lewthwaite, J. M. M., and A. Ø. Mooers. 2021. Geographical homogenization but little net change in the local richness of Canadian butterflies A. Baselga [ed.],. Global Ecology and Biogeography 31: 266–279. https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13426

Aim: Recent studies have found that local-scale plots measured through time exhibit marked variation in the change in species richness. However, the overall effect often reveals no net change. Most studies to date have been agnostic about the identities of the species lost/gained and about the proce…