Niche shifts from adults to fecundity to regeneration for North American Forests

Niche shifts from adults to fecundity to regeneration for North American Forests

Tree distribution and abundance depend not only on climate, but also on habitat variables, such as soils and drainage, and on competition beneath a shaded canopy. Using conditional models to compare the communities represented by joint fecundity and recruitment responses we expose a reorganization across life stages that will contribute to the next generation of forests. Tree fecundity is regulated by temperature to a greater degree than other life-history stages. Recruitment rates are most sensitivity to interactions between climate and habitat variables. Communities reorganized from adults to fecundity, but there is a re-coalescence of community types as seedling recruitment partially reverts to community structure similar to that of adults…[more]

Joint sensitivity taken over all species for adult abundances, conditional recruits (left y-axis with black color), and fecundity (right y-axis in green). Sensitivity is shown as a fraction of the total variance explained for each variable. Posterior medians are show with 95% credible intervals (whiskers).
Map of community assemblages (A) and reorganization as an alluvial diagram (B). Community clustering in (A) is based on adult tree response matrix. (B) Shifts in assemblages across the three demographic stages (adult, fecundity, and conditional recruits) in eighty-seven species.

Qiu, T., S. Shubhi, C. W. Woodall, and J.S. Clark. 2021. Niche shifts from trees to fecundity to recruitment that determine species response to climate change. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 9, 863. https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fevo.2021.719141, DOI10.3389/fevo.2021.719141.

Comments are closed.