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How terrestrial ecosystems will accumulate carbon as the climate continues to change is a major source of uncertainty in projections of future climate. Under growth‐stimulating environmental change, time lags inherent in population and community dynamic processes have been posed to dampen, or alternatively amplify, short‐term carbon gain in terrestrial vegetation, but these outcomes can be difficult to predict. To theoretically frame this problem, we developed a simple model of vegetation dynamics that identifies the stage‐structured demographic and competitive processes that could govern the timescales of carbon storage and loss. We show that demographic lags associated with growth‐stimulating environmental change can allow a rapid increase in population‐level carbon storage that is lost back to the atmosphere in later years. However, this transient carbon storage only emerges when environmental change increases the transition of adult individuals into a larger size class that suffers markedly higher mortality. Otherwise, demographic lags simply slow carbon accumulation. Counterintuitively, an analogous tradeoff between maximum adult size and survivorship in two‐species models, coupled with environmental change‐driven replacement, does not generate the transient carbon gain seen in the single‐species models. Instead lags in competitive replacement slow the approach to the eventual carbon trajectory. Together, our results suggest that time lags inherent in demographic and compositional turnover tend to slow carbon accumulation in systems responding to growth‐stimulating environmental change. Only under specific conditions will lagged demographic processes in such systems drive transient carbon accumulation, conditions that investigators can examine in nature to help project future carbon trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forecasting the impacts of climate change on species persistence in diverse natural communities requires a way to account for indirect effects mediated through species interactions. In particular, we expect species to experience major changes in competition as they track favorable climates. Here, we combine experimental data with a recently developed theoretical framework based on coexistence theory to measure the impact of climate‐driven range shifts on alpine plant persistence under climate change. We transplanted three co‐dominant alpine perennial species to five elevations, creating a maximum of 5°C increase in average growing‐season temperature. We statistically modeled species' demographic rates in response to the environment and interpolated species' intrinsic ranges—the environmental mapping of reproduction in the absence of competition. We used low‐density population growth rates—species' initial rate of invasion into an established community—as a metric of persistence. Further analysis of low‐density growth rates (LGRs) allowed us to parse the direct impacts of climate change from indirect impacts mediated by shifting competition. Our models predict qualitatively different range shifts for each species based on the climate conditions under which growth rates are maximized and where they are zero. Overall, climate change is predicted to increase the intrinsic (competition free) growth rates of all species, as warmer and wetter conditions increase the favorability of alpine habitat. However, these benefits are entirely negated by increased competition arising from greater overlap between competitors in their intrinsic ranges. Species were highly dispersal limited, which can prevent species from tracking shifting intrinsic ranges by reducing population spread rates. Yet dispersal limitation also promoted species' persistence because it promotes persistence mechanisms. Our study demonstrates the complex pathways by which climate change impacts species' persistence by altering their competitive environment, and highlights how a persistence framework based on LGRs can help disentangle impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forecasting the impacts of climate change on biological diversity requires better ways to incorporate competitive interactions into predictions of species' range dynamics and persistence. This problem has been studied extensively in a different context by theoreticians evaluating the coexistence of species in spatially heterogeneous environments. Here, we show how spatial coexistence theory can be adapted to provide a mathematical framework for understanding species persistence in competitive communities under climate change. We first show how the spatial low‐density growth rate provides the relevant metric of species persistence along a climate gradient. We then analyse a model of multiple migrating competitors to show how mechanisms contributing to low‐density growth rates quantify the effect of different competitive processes on persistence, and how these processes change in strength with species' asynchronous migration under climate change. Finally, we outline the empirical utility of the framework, showing how the theory can scale up from local measurements of species performance and competitive interactions to range‐scale metrics of persistence. Treating species' range dynamics as a geographical‐scale coexistence problem presents its own set of challenges, but building from a well‐established body of theory may greatly improve the predictability of species persistence in competitive communities under climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]