Local climate change velocities explain multidirectional range shifts in a North American butterfly assemblage

Species are often expected to shift their distributions poleward to evade warming climates. However, from 18 years of fixed transect monitoring data on 88 species of butterfly in the midwestern United States, we show that butterflies are shifting their centroids in all directions, except towards regions that are becoming warmer. Butterflies shifted their centroids at a mean rate of 4.87 km yr^-1. The rate of centroid shift was significantly associated with local climate change velocity (temperature and precipitation), but not with mean climate change velocity throughout the species’ ranges. Surprisingly, the centroid shift was also unrelated to species traits expected to mediate the shift response including thermal niche breadth (range of climates butterflies experience throughout their distribution) and wingspan (often used as metric for dispersal capability). Contrasting with a number of previous studies, we observed relatively high phylogenetic signal in the rate and direction species shifted their centroids, suggesting that evolutionary history helps to explain multidirectional range shift responses and that some groups of species will be better able to shift their ranges than others. This research shows important signatures of multidirectional range shifts (latitudinal and longitudinal) and uniquely shows that local climate change velocities are more important in driving range shifts than the mean climate change velocity throughout a species’ entire range.