Search

Domestication is an ongoing well-described process. However, while many have studied the changes domestication causes in plant genetics, few have explored its impact on the portion of the geographic landscape in which the plants exist. Therefore, the goal of this study was to understand how the process of domestication changed the geographic space suitable for chile pepper ( Capsicum annuum ) in its center of origin (domestication). C. annuum is a major crop species globally whose center of domestication, Mexico, has been well-studied. It provides a unique opportunity to explore the degree to which ranges of different domestication classes diverged and how these ranges might be altered by climate change. To this end, we created ecological niche models for four domestication classes (wild, semiwild, landrace, modern cultivar) based on present climate and future climate scenarios for 2050, 2070, and 2090. Considering present environment, we found substantial overlap in the geographic niches of all the domestication classes. Yet, environmental and geographic aspects of the current ranges did vary among classes. Wild and commercial varieties could grow in desert conditions, while landraces could not. With projections into the future, habitat was lost asymmetrically, with wild, semiwild, and landraces at greater risk of territorial declines than modern cultivars. Further, we identified areas where future suitability overlap between landraces and wilds is expected to be lost. While range expansion is widely associated with domestication, we found little support of a constant niche expansion (either in environmental or geographical space) throughout the domestication gradient in chile peppers in Mexico. Instead, particular domestication transitions resulted in loss, followed by capturing or recapturing environmental or geographic space. The differences in environmental characterization among domestication gradient classes and their future potential range shifts increase the need for conservation efforts to preserve landraces and semiwild genotypes., Competing Interests: Authors declare that they have no conflict of interest, including commercial or intellectual property interest in wild, local, or any germplasm., (© 2023 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

In species distribution analyses, environmental predictors and distribution data for large spatial extents are often available in long-lat format, such as degree raster grids. Long-lat projections suffer from unequal cell sizes, as a degree of longitude decreases in length from approximately 110 km at the equator to 0 km at the poles. Here we investigate whether long-lat and equal-area projections yield similar model parameter estimates, or result in a consistent bias. We analyzed the environmental effects on the distribution of 12 ungulate species with a northern distribution, as models for these species should display the strongest effect of projectional distortion. Additionally we choose four species with entirely continental distributions to investigate the effect of incomplete cell coverage at the coast. We expected that including model weights proportional to the actual cell area should compensate for the observed bias in model coefficients, and similarly that using land coverage of a cell should decrease bias in species with coastal distribution. As anticipated, model coefficients were different between long-lat and equal-area projections. Having progressively smaller and a higher number of cells with increasing latitude influenced the importance of parameters in models, increased the sample size for the northernmost parts of species ranges, and reduced the subcell variability of those areas. However, this bias could be largely removed by weighting long-lat cells by the area they cover, and marginally by correcting for land coverage. Overall we found little effect of using long-lat rather than equal-area projections in our analysis. The fitted relationship between environmental parameters and occurrence probability differed only very little between the two projection types. We still recommend using equal-area projections to avoid possible bias. More importantly, our results suggest that the cell area and the proportion of a cell covered by land should be used as a weight when analyzing distribution of terrestrial species.