Abstract
Climate and land cover changes are important drivers of the plant species distributions and diversity patterns in mountainous regions. Although the need for a multifaceted view of diversity based on taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic dimensions is now commonly recognized, there are no complete risk assessments concerning their expected changes. In this paper, we used a range of species distribution models in an ensemble-forecasting framework together with regional climate and land cover projections by 2080 to analyze the potential threat for more than 2,500 plant species at high resolution (2.5 km × 2.5 km) in the French Alps. We also decomposed taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity facets into α and β components and analyzed their expected changes by 2080. Overall, plant species threats from climate and land cover changes in the French Alps were expected to vary depending on the species' preferred altitudinal vegetation zone, rarity, and conservation status. Indeed, rare species and species of conservation concern were the ones projected to experience less severe change, and also the ones being the most efficiently preserved by the current network of protected areas. Conversely, the three facets of plant diversity were also projected to experience drastic spatial re-shuffling by 2080. In general, the mean α-diversity of the three facets was projected to increase to the detriment of regional β-diversity, although the latter was projected to remain high at the montane-alpine transition zones. Our results show that, due to a high-altitude distribution, the current protection network is efficient for rare species, and species predicted to migrate upward. Although our modeling framework may not capture all possible mechanisms of species range shifts, our work illustrates that a comprehensive risk assessment on an entire floristic region combined with functional and phylogenetic information can help delimitate future scenarios of biodiversity and better design its protection.
Highlights
An additional issue of our analysis concerns the relatively static view of biodiversity
Climate and land cover changes are projected to modify the spatial distribution of plant species and plant diversity in the French Alps
The most common species are projected to experience drastic changes in their suitable habitats, rare species seem to be much less affected by projected environmental changes, mostly because they occupy specific meso-scale environmental conditions at very high altitude that remain to be present in the future
Summary
Study areaThis study was conducted over the French Alps region (Fig. 1), which covers 26 000 km and presents a wide range of environmental conditions due to mixed continental, oceanic and Mediterranean climate influences and steep altitudinal gradients.We used a vegetation database from the National Alpine Botanical Conservatory (CBNA, Fig. 1, dark grey shading in the national map), including more than 164 500 sampling plots recorded between 1980 and the present at a resolution greater than or equal to 250 m. We started with the 3250 plant species present in the CBNA database, based on a standardized species taxonomic nomenclature (Kergélen 1993) To complement these data, we gathered additional 4000 occurrence data points from the National Mediterranean Botanical Conservatory (CBMED) for 1000 species from the previous list that occur in the extreme south of French Alps (Fig. 1, light grey shading in the national map). We gathered additional 4000 occurrence data points from the National Mediterranean Botanical Conservatory (CBMED) for 1000 species from the previous list that occur in the extreme south of French Alps (Fig. 1, light grey shading in the national map) This additional information from the Mediterranean area allowed us to be confident that the warm portion of species niches was adequately captured (Fig. 1). This procedure has the advantage of smoothing the sampling bias in highly sampled sub-regions
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