Abstract
Forecasting the impact of future global warming on biodiversity requires understanding how temperature limits the distribution of species. Here we rely on Liebig's Law of Minimum to estimate the effect of temperature on the maximum potential abundance that a species can attain at a certain location. We develop 95%‐quantile regressions to model the influence of effective temperature sum on the maximum potential abundance of 25 common understory plant species of Finland, along 868 nationwide plots sampled in 1985. Fifteen of these species showed a significant response to temperature sum that was consistent in temperature‐only models and in all‐predictors models, which also included cumulative precipitation, soil texture, soil fertility, tree species and stand maturity as predictors. For species with significant and consistent responses to temperature, we forecasted potential shifts in abundance for the period 2041–2070 under the IPCC A1B emission scenario using temperature‐only models. We predict major potential changes in abundance and average northward distribution shifts of 6–8 km yr−1. Our results emphasize inter‐specific differences in the impact of global warming on the understory layer of boreal forests. Species in all functional groups from dwarf shrubs, herbs and grasses to bryophytes and lichens showed significant responses to temperature, while temperature did not limit the abundance of 10 species. We discuss the interest of modelling the ‘maximum potential abundance’ to deal with the uncertainty in the predictions of realized abundances associated to the effect of environmental factors not accounted for and to dispersal limitations of species, among others. We believe this concept has a promising and unexplored potential to forecast the impact of specific drivers of global change under future scenarios.
Highlights
The biogeographical distribution of plant species is changing as a response to current global warming, and this trend is expected to continue over the decades (Lenoir and Svenning 2015)
The objective of this work is to forecast the effect of global warming on the maximum potential abundance of boreal forest understory plants for the upcoming decades
The predicted response of species to effective temperature sum was generally consistent between temperature-only models and all-predictors models: trends were alike in 15 of the 16 species that showed significant responses to effective temperature sum in both models (Supplementary material Appendix 1, 3)
Summary
The biogeographical distribution of plant species is changing as a response to current global warming, and this trend is expected to continue over the decades (Lenoir and Svenning 2015) This is especially likely in boreal and arctic environments, where changes in climate are predicted to be larger than at more equatorial latitudes. In order to take advantage of best practices for conservation and ecosystem management, the effects of warming on vegetation may need to be forecasted This is a challenging objective given the intrinsic complexity of species environmental responses and between-species positive and negative interactions, and only some studies have attempted to predict latitudinal shifts of northern vegetation under future global warming scenarios to date (but see Gignac et al 1998, Bakkenes et al 2002, Beauregard and de Blois 2016)
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