Demogenetic simulations reveal fragmenting effects of climate change on insular lizard populations

Abstract

The extinction risk of insular species with sessile life histories is expected to increase as they may be unable to track habitat in response to global climate change. Demogenetic simulations can couple population demography and niche modeling to produce spatially-explicit genetic and demographic information for all simulated individuals and provide insight into the effects of climate change at demographic and population genetic levels. We used CDMETAPOP to simulate a population of island night lizards (Xantusia riversiana) on Santa Barbara Island to evaluate its sensitivity to climate change to the year 2100 across 8 scenarios based on 2 climate models, 2 emissions pathways, and 2 connectivity models. We found that 1) X. riversiana is sensitive to climate change with SDMs predicting a loss of suitable habitat of 93%-98% by 2038, 2) population genetic structure is expected to increase drastically to 0.209-0.673 from approximately 0.0346, and 3) estimated minimum abundance is expected to declined sharply over the 2007 to 2038 period and reached values of 0-1% of the 2007 population size in all scenarios by 2100. Climate change is expected to decrease census population size and result in extant habitat patches that are isolated from one another with very high levels of genetic divergence over short periods of time. These patterns may drive the Santa Barbara Island population to extinction under certain scenarios. Management plans should address methods to improve connectivity on the island and attempt to create refugial patches. Contingency plans, such as translocation, may be required to prevent population extirpation. This study highlights the utility of demogenetic simulations in evaluating population demographic and genetic patterns under climate change with suggestions on workflows for running simulations in a high-throughput manner.