Species shifts in response to climate change: Individual or shared responses?1,2

Abstract

Abstract Individual species are expected to shift their distributions in response to global climate change. Species within existing communities may respond to climate change individualistically, resulting in the formation of novel communities, or may instead shift as intact communities. We examined whether montane plant communities in the northeastern United States have shifted their elevational range as intact assemblages or individualistically in response to recent regional climatic and environmental change. We used non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) to examine changes in plant community composition and species distributions using vegetation surveys repeated five times between 1964 and 2006 across an elevational gradient (549–1158 m) on Camels Hump Mountain, Vermont, USA, in conjunction with an analysis of local climate change. We found evidence that species elevational distributions and community compositions have shifted in response to a 0.49 °C per decade warming. These species responses were...