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Evidence of Tree Species’ Range Shifts in a Complex Landscape

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Title Evidence of Tree Species’ Range Shifts in a Complex Landscape
Names Monleon, Vicente J. (creator)
Lintz, Heather E. (creator)
Date Issued 2015-01-29 (iso8601)
Note To the best of our knowledge, one or more authors of this paper were federal employees when contributing to this work. This is the publisher’s final pdf. The article was published by the Public Library of Science and is in the public domain. The published article can be found at: http://www.plosone.org/.
Abstract Climate change is expected to change the distribution of species. For long-lived, sessile
species such as trees, tracking the warming climate depends on seedling colonization of
newly favorable areas. We compare the distribution of seedlings and mature trees for all but
the rarest tree species in California, Oregon and Washington, United States of America, a
large, environmentally diverse region. Across 46 species, the mean annual temperature of
the range of seedlings was 0.120°C colder than that of the range of trees (95% confidence
interval from 0.096 to 0.144°C). The extremes of the seedling distributions also shifted towards
colder temperature than those of mature trees, but the change was less pronounced.
Although the mean elevation and mean latitude of the range of seedlings was higher than
and north of those of the range of mature trees, elevational and latitudinal shifts run in opposite
directions for the majority of the species, reflecting the lack of a direct biological relationship
between species’ distributions and those variables. The broad scale, environmental
diversity and variety of disturbance regimes and land uses of the study area, the large number
and exhaustive sampling of tree species, and the direct causal relationship between the
temperature response and a warming climate, provide strong evidence to attribute the observed
shifts to climate change.
Genre Article
Access Condition http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
Identifier Monleon, V. J., & Lintz, H. E. (2015). Evidence of Tree Species’ Range Shifts in a Complex Landscape. PLoS ONE, 10(1), e0118069. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0118069

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