Abstract
AbstractAimTo examine how snow cover and permafrost affect plant species distributions at a subcontinental extent.LocationMountain realm of Fennoscandia, northern Europe.Time periodSpecies data from 1 January 1990–25 February 2019.Major taxa studiedArctic‐alpine and boreal vascular plants.MethodsWe examined the effect of snow persistence and permafrost occurrence on the distributions of arctic‐alpine and boreal plant species while controlling for climate, topography and geological factors. Data comprised 475,811 observations from 671 species in the Fennoscandian mountains. We investigated the relationships between species distributions and environmental variables using four modelling methods and ensemble modelling building on both non‐spatial and spatial models.ResultsSnow persistence was the most important driver of plant species distributions, with the greatest variable importance for both arctic‐alpine (38.2%) and boreal (49.9%) species. Permafrost had a consistent minor effect on the predicted distributions. Arctic‐alpine plants occur in areas with long snow persistence and permafrost, whereas boreal species showed the opposite habitat preferences.Main conclusionsOur results highlight the importance of snow persistence in driving the distribution of vascular plant species in cold environments at a subcontinental scale. The notable contribution of the cryosphere to plant species distribution models indicates that the inclusion of snow information in particular may improve our understanding and model predictions of biogeographical patterns in cold regions.
Highlights
Species biogeographical patterns are the products of local environmental conditions, dispersal, evolutionary history and biotic interactions
To the best of our knowledge, the present results show, for the first time, that cryogenic features affect vascular plant species distributions at a subcontinental scale, even when other fundamental environmental variables are controlled for
Our findings highlight that snow conditions in particular need to be considered explicitly in biogeographical studies, at broader spatial scales, and at landscape-level scales where the importance of winter conditions has been acknowledged previously (Niittynen, Heikkinen, & Luoto, 2020; Niittynen & Luoto, 2018; Sundstøl & Odland, 2017)
Summary
Species biogeographical patterns are the products of local environmental conditions, dispersal, evolutionary history and biotic interactions. We examine the effect of snow persistence and permafrost occurrence on two major biogeographical groups of vascular plant species (arctic-alpine and boreal) of tundra vegetation at subcontinental scale in the mountain environment of Fennoscandia. Due to the wide topographical relief from the fjord bottoms at sea level to mountain summits (2,469 m a.s.l.), the vegetation of the area is a combination of species with very different ecologies and distributional ranges. To capture this heterogeneity, we included both boreal and arctic-alpine species in our study
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