Explaining African Primate distribution patterns

Climate change and human activities are greatly altering the environments in which non-human primates live and it is important that we understand how primates will respond to these changes if we wish to support their survival. To predict species’ responses to changes, we need to understand the mechanisms behind observed species-habitat relationships. However, the actual species-habitat relationships and the underlying mechanisms behind them are still poorly understood and stochastic factors also play an important role in primate biogeography. Therefore, we investigated which biological traits underlie observed species-habitat relationships for all major mainland African diurnal primate genera at >200 field sites using RLQ, fourth corner and GLM analyses.

Initial results show that distribution patterns of genera correlate most strongly with temperature seasonality, rainfall, rainfall seasonality, and canopy height. Contrary to our prediction, our initial results suggest that genus-typical biological traits (locomotion, diet, limb proportions, body mass, grouping, age at first reproduction) are not strongly linked to genus-environment relationships. If this pattern persists in further analyses, this means that, although biological traits remain important for individual species, differences between genera in biogeographical distributions are not clearly linked to their biological differences. This would mean that we need to consider predictive models that incorporate dispersal ability and stochastic factors for continent-wide studies whilst biological trait-based mechanistic models may be most appropriate at localised scales.