Meeting Abstract
Characid fishes (New World tetras) have a South American origin, but colonized North America as part of the Great American Interchange. Here, we construct biologically grounded niche models for the northernmost species, and use projections for climate change across the North American continent to predict possible areas of range expansion under various disturbance scenarios. We find that relatively modest ecological differences among species lead to very different projections; in particular, generalist species are expected to expand northward more rapidly than either hypercarnivores or herbivores.
