Community turnover by composition and climatic affinity across scales in an alpine system

Premise of the study: Examining community turnover across climate gradients at multiple scales is vital to understanding biogeographic response to climate change. This approach is especially important for alpine plants in which the relative roles of topographic complexity and non-climatic or stochas...

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Vydáno v:bioRxiv
Hlavní autoři: Smithers, Brian V, Oldfather, Meagan F, Koontz, Michael J, Bishop, Jim, Bishop, Catie, Nachlinger, Jan, Sheth, Seema N
Médium: Paper
Jazyk:angličtina
Vydáno: Cold Spring Harbor Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 08.08.2019
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Vydání:1.2
Témata:
Climate change
Community composition
Ecology
Microclimate
Niches
Plant communities
beta diversity
species turnover
Great Basin
elevation gradient
White Mountains
climatic niche mean
alpine ecology
GLORIA
community assembly
ISSN:2692-8205, 2692-8205
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Shrnutí:Premise of the study: Examining community turnover across climate gradients at multiple scales is vital to understanding biogeographic response to climate change. This approach is especially important for alpine plants in which the relative roles of topographic complexity and non-climatic or stochastic factors vary across spatial scales. Methods: We examined the structure of alpine plant communities across elevation gradients in the White Mountains, California. Using community climatic niche means (CCNMs) and measures of community dissimilarity, we explored the relationship between community composition and elevation gradients at three scales: the mountain range, individual peaks, and within elevation contours. Key Results: At the mountain range scale, community turnover and CCNMs showed strongly significant relationships with elevation, with an increase in the abundance of cooler and wetter-adapted species at higher elevations. At the scale of a single peaks, we found weak and inconsistent relationships between CCNMs and elevation, but variation in community composition explained by elevation increased. Within the elevation contours, the range of CCNMs was weakly positively correlated with turnover in species identity, likely driven by microclimate and other site-specific factors. Conclusions: Our results suggest that there is strong environmental sorting of alpine plant communities at broad scales, but microclimatic and site-specific, non-climatic factors together shape community turnover at finer scales. In the context of climate change, our results imply that community-climate relationships are scale-dependent, and predictions of local alpine plant range shifts are limited by a lack of topoclimatic and habitat information. Footnotes * Editing/framing for clarity; inclusion of a conceptual diagram * http://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8968793
Bibliografie:SourceType-Working Papers-1
ObjectType-Working Paper/Pre-Print-1
content type line 50
ISSN:2692-8205
2692-8205
DOI:10.1101/659169