Stronger influence of anthropogenic disturbance than climate change on century-scale compositional changes in northern forests.
Nat Commun
; 10(1): 1265, 2019 03 20.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-30894543
ABSTRACT
Predicting future ecosystem dynamics depends critically on an improved understanding of how disturbances and climate change have driven long-term ecological changes in the past. Here we assembled a dataset of >100,000 tree species lists from the 19th century across a broad region (>130,000km2) in temperate eastern Canada, as well as recent forest inventories, to test the effects of changes in anthropogenic disturbance, temperature and moisture on forest dynamics. We evaluate changes in forest composition using four indices quantifying the affinities of co-occurring tree species with temperature, drought, light and disturbance. Land-use driven shifts favouring more disturbance-adapted tree species are far stronger than any effects ascribable to climate change, although the responses of species to disturbance are correlated with their expected responses to climate change. As such, anthropogenic and natural disturbances are expected to have large direct effects on forests and also indirect effects via altered responses to future climate change.
Texto completo:
1
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Árvores
/
Modelos Estatísticos
/
Agricultura Florestal
/
Dispersão Vegetal
Idioma:
En
Ano de publicação:
2019
Tipo de documento:
Article