Plant Species Migration as a Key Uncertainty in Predicting Future Impacts of Climate Change on Ecosystems: Progress and Challenges

TLDR: In this article, a failure to incorporate migration limitations into models of vegetation response to climate change greatly compromises their predictive capability, and the uncertainty due to migration is therefore substantial, as shown in Figure 1.

Abstract: As we show above, a failure to incorporate migration limitations into models of vegetation response to climate change greatly compromises their predictive capability, and the uncertainty due to migration is therefore substantial. Species range shifts have been a ubiquitous response by plant species during Pleistocene climate change, and early signs of this response are evident in modern assemblages. Recent work has increased our understanding of the dispersal limitations to migration rate, but there has been far less focus on the issues which govern population establishment and growth rate, especially at the edge of species’ ranges.