Abstract

Vegetation is composed of many individual species whose climatic tolerances can be integrated into spatial analyses of climate change risk. Here, we quantify climate change risk to vegetation at a continental scale by calculating the safety margins for warming and drying (i.e., tolerance to projected change in temperature and precipitation respectively) across plants sharing 100 km × 100 km grid cells (locations). These safety margins measure how much warmer, or drier, a location could become before its ‘typical’ species exceeds its observed climatic limit. We also analyse the potential adaptive capacity of vegetation to temperature and precipitation change (i.e., likelihood of in situ persistence) using median precipitation and temperature breadth across all species in each location. 47% of vegetation across Australia is potentially at risk from increases in mean annual temperature (MAT) by 2070, with tropical regions most vulnerable. Vegetation at high risk from climate change often also exhibited low adaptive capacity. By contrast, 2% of the continent is at risk from reductions in annual precipitation by 2070. Risk from precipitation change was isolated to the southwest of Western Australia where both the safety margin for drier conditions in the typical species is low, and substantial reductions in MAP are projected.

Highlights

  • The composition of vegetation is expected to undergo substantial reassembly in response to anthropogenic climate change[1,2]

  • We address two questions: (1) How does the risk of climate change to vegetation vary across the landscape and between Australia’s Major Vegetation Groups (MVGs)? in which locations does predicted exposure to climate change exceed the safety margin for warming or drying in vegetation? Exposure (E) is estimated from projections of future climate for the decade centred on 2070, focusing on two drivers of vegetation distribution at a continental scale – mean annual temperature (MAT; °C) and mean annual precipitation (MAP; mm)

  • Brown regions in (A) and (B) indicate locations where exposure to climate change exceeds the safety margin of vegetation based on current MAT and MAP, and vice versa for blue locations

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Summary

Introduction

The composition of vegetation is expected to undergo substantial reassembly in response to anthropogenic climate change[1,2]. Approaches for measuring response and adaptive capacity to climate change typically involve detailed experimentation, often including genetic or genomic analyses, to determine fundamental tolerance limits in controlled environments or field settings[13,14,15]. These approaches are highly informative but cannot be applied practically to entire suites of species occupying whole regions or continents. Using approximately 2.5 million cleaned occurrence records for the Australian flora we calculate observed upper temperature and lower precipitation limits and breadths for 20,608 taxonomically-valid higher plant species We aggregate these observed limits into metrics of tolerance and adaptive capacity in a set of vegetation units www.nature.com/scientificreports/.

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