Elevational species shifts in a warmer climate are overestimated when based on weather station data
TLDR
The results demonstrate that weather station data are unable to reflect the complex thermal patterns of aerodynamically decoupled alpine vegetation at the investigated scales, which might lead to misinterpretation and inaccurate prediction.Abstract:
Strong topographic variation interacting with low stature alpine vegetation creates a multitude of micro-habitats poorly represented by common 2 m above the ground meteorological measurements (weather station data). However, the extent to which the actual habitat temperatures in alpine landscapes deviate from meteorological data at different spatial scales has rarely been quantified. In this study, we assessed thermal surface and soil conditions across topographically rich alpine landscapes by thermal imagery and miniature data loggers from regional (2-km2) to plot (1-m2) scale. The data were used to quantify the effects of spatial sampling resolution on current micro-habitat distributions and habitat loss due to climate warming scenarios. Soil temperatures showed substantial variation among slopes (2–3 K) dependent on slope exposure, within slopes (3–4 K) due to micro-topography and within 1-m2 plots (1 K) as a result of plant cover effects. A reduction of spatial sampling resolution from 1 × 1 m to 100 × 100 m leads to an underestimation of current habitat diversity by 25% and predicts a six-times higher habitat loss in a 2-K warming scenario. Our results demonstrate that weather station data are unable to reflect the complex thermal patterns of aerodynamically decoupled alpine vegetation at the investigated scales. Thus, the use of interpolated weather station data to describe alpine life conditions without considering the micro-topographically induced thermal mosaic might lead to misinterpretation and inaccurate prediction.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Latitudinal gradients as natural laboratories to infer species' responses to temperature
Pieter De Frenne,Pieter De Frenne,Bente J. Graae,Francisco Rodríguez-Sánchez,Annette Kolb,Olivier Chabrerie,Guillaume Decocq,Hanne De Kort,An De Schrijver,Martin Diekmann,Ove Eriksson,Robert Gruwez,Martin Hermy,Jonathan Lenoir,Jan Plue,David A. Coomes,Kris Verheyen +16 more
TL;DR: The synthesis indicates that many life-history traits of plants vary with latitude but the translation of latitudinal clines into responses to temperature is a crucial step, and integrated approaches of observational studies along temperature gradients, experimental methods and common garden experiments increasingly emerge as the way forward to further the authors' understanding of species and community responses to climate warming.
Journal ArticleDOI
Functional traits predict relationship between plant abundance dynamic and long-term climate warming
Nadejda A. Soudzilovskaia,Tatiana G. Elumeeva,Vladimir G. Onipchenko,Islam I. Shidakov,Fatima S. Salpagarova,Anzor B. Khubiev,D. K. Tekeev,Johannes H. C. Cornelissen +7 more
TL;DR: It is shown that plant functional traits can be used as predictors of vegetation response to climate warming, accounting in the test ecosystem for 59% of variability in the per-species abundance relation to temperature.
Journal ArticleDOI
Where, why and how? Explaining the low-temperature range limits of temperate tree species
Christian Körner,David Basler,Günter Hoch,Chris Kollas,Chris Kollas,Armando Lenz,Christophe F. Randin,Yann Vitasse,Yann Vitasse,Niklaus E. Zimmermann +9 more
TL;DR: The range limits of the examined tree species are set by the interactive influence of freezing resistance in spring, phenology settings, and the time required to mature tissue, a synthesis of a multidisciplinary project that offers mechanistic explanations.
Book ChapterDOI
Advances in Monitoring and Modelling Climate at Ecologically Relevant Scales
Isobel Bramer,Barbara J. Anderson,Jonathan Bennie,Andrew J. Bladon,Pieter De Frenne,Deborah Hemming,Deborah Hemming,Ross A. Hill,Michael R. Kearney,Christian Körner,Amanda H. Korstjens,Jonathan Lenoir,Ilya M. D. Maclean,Christopher Marsh,Michael D. Morecroft,Ralf Ohlemüller,Helen D. Slater,Andrew J. Suggitt,Florian Zellweger,Phillipa K. Gillingham +19 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide an overview of microclimatic processes and summarise the available methods of measuring and modelling microclimate data for incorporation in ecological research, highlighting pitfalls to avoid emerging novel methods and the limitations of some techniques.
Journal ArticleDOI
Identifying the driving factors behind observed elevational range shifts on European mountains
John-Arvid Grytnes,Jutta Kapfer,Jutta Kapfer,Gerald Jurasinski,Hilary H. Birks,Hanne Henriksen,Kari Klanderud,Arvid Odland,Mikael Ohlson,Sonja Wipf,H. John B. Birks,H. John B. Birks,H. John B. Birks +12 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the same species tend to move up on different mountains, and the observed shifts in the upper range limit of alpine plants over 40 to 100 years on 114 mountains.
References
More filters
Climate change 2007: the physical science basis
Susan Solomon,Dahe Qin,Martin R. Manning,Melinda Marquis,Kristen Averyt,Melinda M.B. Tignor,H. L. Miller,Z. Chen +7 more
TL;DR: The first volume of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report as mentioned in this paper was published in 2007 and covers several topics including the extensive range of observations now available for the atmosphere and surface, changes in sea level, assesses the paleoclimatic perspective, climate change causes both natural and anthropogenic, and climate models for projections of global climate.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ecological responses to recent climate change.
Gian-Reto Walther,Eric Post,Peter Convey,Annette Menzel,Camille Parmesan,Trevor J. C. Beebee,Jean-Marc Fromentin,Ove Hoegh-Guldberg,Franz Bairlein +8 more
TL;DR: A review of the ecological impacts of recent climate change exposes a coherent pattern of ecological change across systems, from polar terrestrial to tropical marine environments.
Journal ArticleDOI
Novel methods improve prediction of species' distributions from occurrence data
Jane Elith,Catherine H. Graham,Robert P. Anderson,Miroslav Dudík,Simon Ferrier,Antoine Guisan,Robert J. Hijmans,Falk Huettmann,John R. Leathwick,Anthony Lehmann,Jin Li,Lúcia G. Lohmann,Bette A. Loiselle,Glenn Manion,Craig Moritz,Miguel Nakamura,Yoshinori Nakazawa,Jacob C. M. Mc Overton,A. Townsend Peterson,Steven J. Phillips,Karen Richardson,Ricardo Scachetti-Pereira,Robert E. Schapire,Jorge Soberón,Stephen E. Williams,Mary S. Wisz,Niklaus E. Zimmermann +26 more
TL;DR: This work compared 16 modelling methods over 226 species from 6 regions of the world, creating the most comprehensive set of model comparisons to date and found that presence-only data were effective for modelling species' distributions for many species and regions.
Journal ArticleDOI
Extinction risk from climate change
Chris D. Thomas,Alison Cameron,Rhys E. Green,Rhys E. Green,Michel Bakkenes,Linda J. Beaumont,Yvonne C. Collingham,Barend F.N. Erasmus,Marinez Ferreira de Siqueira,Alan Grainger,Lee Hannah,Lesley Hughes,Brian Huntley,Albert S. van Jaarsveld,Guy F. Midgley,Lera Miles,Lera Miles,Miguel A. Ortega-Huerta,A. Townsend Peterson,Oliver L. Phillips,Stephen E. Williams +20 more
TL;DR: Estimates of extinction risks for sample regions that cover some 20% of the Earth's terrestrial surface show the importance of rapid implementation of technologies to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and strategies for carbon sequestration.
Journal ArticleDOI
Predictive habitat distribution models in ecology
TL;DR: A review of predictive habitat distribution modeling is presented, which shows that a wide array of models has been developed to cover aspects as diverse as biogeography, conservation biology, climate change research, and habitat or species management.