Does Spatial Sampling Bias Influence the Accuracy of Habitat Suitability Modeling for Fossil Taxa?
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In recent years, paleoclimate modeling has advanced considerably, and paleoclimate simulations produced by Timmermann and colleagues now cover the last 3 million years at 1° spatial resolution. This 3 Ma model has been used to examine climate effects on hominin evolution and to project hominin habitat suitability beyond known fossil occurrences. While such models provide useful tools for studying paleoenvironments, spatial biases in the fossil record limit our understanding of where extinct taxa lived, and the resolution of global-scale paleoclimate data remains coarse. Here, I assess the accuracy of habitat suitability models (HSMs) for fossil taxa by using the 3 Ma simulation in conjunction with the eastern African mammal fossil record. I constructed climate envelopes for 77 fossil mammals, including several ecologically distinct species. Each species’ climate envelope was used to calculate an HSM throughout the entire continent of Africa. Results show remarkable similarity in the HSMs despite differing ecological niches. HSMs converge on the same geographic pattern, including high suitability along the Eastern African Rift System, high suitability in the Kalahari Basin, and an east-west Sahelian band of moderate suitability. These patterns are strikingly similar to HSMs previously estimated for early hominins in high impact publications. I suggest that HSMs for these ecologically distinctive species are so similar because all Plio-Pleistocene mammal fossils, including hominins, derive from the same small handful of highly fossiliferous localities, and using available coarse-scale paleoenvironmental data, HSMs are heavily influenced by spatial sampling bias.
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