Abstract
We review the roles that plant species traits and biogeography play in species’ exposure and vulnerability to decline or extinction under global change, focusing on separate and combined impacts of multiple threats – climate change, land-use change, and altered disturbance regimes. We establish a conceptual framework and research agenda for identifying the spatial characteristics of species ranges, as well as the life history and functional traits, that are associated with extinction risk for plant species with functional attributes emblematic of fire-prone, winter-precipitation Mediterranean-type ecosystems (MTEs). MTEs worldwide are characterized by their high plant diversity and unique floras, historical and contemporary high rates of land use change, and strong interactions between climate, fire, and land use. We focus on the California Floristic Province (CFP), an MTE that is a global plant diversity hotspot, and show how our framework can be used to understand the relationships between vulnerability to multiple global change drivers, species traits, and biogeography. Vulnerability can be assessed across species using linked distribution and population models that forecast plant responses to global change scenarios. Our overarching hypothesis is that species-specific vulnerability to global change in MTEs is a function of interactions between species and spatial traits: the nature of this interaction will depend on the type of global change process.
Highlights
As human-driven transformation of earth system processes rapidly increases, understanding how global change affects biological diversity is the greatest conservation challenge of our time (Rockstrom et al 2009)
Summarizing the literature reviewed in the previous sections, we identify some functional and response traits that are often measured in plant trait studies and that we hypothesize mediate global change effects on Mediterranean-type ecosystems (MTEs) plant population dynamics along the dimensions of life history strategy, leaf economic strategy, and hydraulic strategy (Table 1)
Our framework linking plants traits, species biogeography, and the spatial context of multiple global change threats that render plant species vulnerable to extinction, is applicable to MTEs owing to their high plant diversity and unique floras, historical and contemporary high rates of land use change, and strong interactions between climate, fire, and land use
Summary
As human-driven transformation of earth system processes rapidly increases, understanding how global change affects biological diversity is the greatest conservation challenge of our time (Rockstrom et al 2009). Summarizing the literature reviewed in the previous sections, we identify some functional and response traits that are often measured in plant trait studies and that we hypothesize mediate global change effects on MTE plant population dynamics along the dimensions of life history strategy, leaf economic strategy, and hydraulic strategy (Table 1) These include traits related to stress tolerance as well as fire disturbance response that are important in shaping MTE plant species and community distributions. Distribution shifts induced by climate change may result in disproportionate habitat reduction or fragmentation for plant populations abutting coastlines, or urbanized areas, or shifting to higher elevations where there is less land area (Thuiller et al 2005, Hijmans and Graham 2006, Kelly and Goulden 2008, Preston et al 2008, Kuhn et al 2016)
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