Abstract
Research Highlights: This paper integrates disparate research results pertaining to climate change impacts to 12 co-occurring forest tree species and their climatypes such that management options for the ecosystem as a whole become discernible. Background and Objectives: The ecosystem under analysis is the Thuja-Tsuga forest ecosystem, occupying ca. 121,500 km2 in a largely mountainous setting in the interior northwest, USA. Our goal is to present land management options tied directly to climate-change in a straightforward framework for both the current and future generations. Materials and Methods: By merging synecological and genecological concepts in a climatic framework, we simplify complex interactions in a manner that relates directly to climate change impacts. Species and climatype distributions are redefined in terms of mean annual temperature and elevation of forested landscapes. Results: For each 2 °C increase in temperature, plant associations should shift upwards ca. 400 m, provided precipitation remains at or near contemporary levels, which, for this ecosystem, vary between 300 mm and 1450 mm. Management guidelines are developed for (a) selecting climatypes of the species suited to the climate at the leading edge of the migration front, (b) anticipating decline at the trailing edge, and (c) converting climatypes in areas where species should persist. Conclusions: Our results can provide robust strategies for adapting forest management to the effects of climate change, but their effectiveness is dependent on the implementation of global warming mitigation actions.
Highlights
Warming climates increase atmospheric energy which, in turn, increases weather variability such that extreme climatic events are reaching new thresholds [1]
Species distributions are plotted linearly for mean annual temperature, which forces the scale for elevation to be nonlinear
The climatypes, reflect the clines in genetic variability that were produced by climatic selection in the generations leading up to and including the reference period
Summary
Warming climates increase atmospheric energy which, in turn, increases weather variability such that extreme climatic events are reaching new thresholds [1]. Species are coping by altering physiology, morphology, phenology, or genetics, leading toward an erosion of the fitness of organisms to their environments [2]. For forest trees, climate change has increased the incidence of insects and disease [3,4,5,6], advanced spring phenologies [7,8], and lengthened growing seasons [9]. As trees become less attuned physiologically to their environment, forest health deteriorates and mortality accrues. Restoring a semblance of balance between ecological distributions and the climate requires contraction at the trailing edge of the migration front [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17] and immigration at the leading edge [16,17,18]
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