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Climate shapes and shifts functional biodiversity in forests worldwide
- Source :
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116:587-592
- Publication Year :
- 2018
- Publisher :
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018.
-
Abstract
- Much ecological research aims to explain how climate impacts biodiversity and ecosystem-level processes through functional traits that link environment with individual performance. However, the specific climatic drivers of functional diversity across space and time remain unclear due largely to limitations in the availability of paired trait and climate data. We compile and analyze a global forest dataset using a method based on abundance-weighted trait moments to assess how climate influences the shapes of whole-community trait distributions. Our approach combines abundance-weighted metrics with diverse climate factors to produce a comprehensive catalog of trait–climate relationships that differ dramatically—27% of significant results change in sign and 71% disagree on sign, significance, or both—from traditional species-weighted methods. We find that ( i ) functional diversity generally declines with increasing latitude and elevation, ( ii ) temperature variability and vapor pressure are the strongest drivers of geographic shifts in functional composition and ecological strategies, and ( iii ) functional composition may currently be shifting over time due to rapid climate warming. Our analysis demonstrates that climate strongly governs functional diversity and provides essential information needed to predict how biodiversity and ecosystem function will respond to climate change.
- Subjects :
- 0106 biological sciences
Functional ecology
Multidisciplinary
010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences
business.industry
Global warming
Environmental resource management
Biodiversity
Climate change
010603 evolutionary biology
01 natural sciences
Latitude
Geography
Trait
Ecosystem
business
Macroecology
0105 earth and related environmental sciences
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 10916490 and 00278424
- Volume :
- 116
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi...........65f46b859207055913850d982eb925cc