Climate Shapes and Shifts Functional Biodiversity in Forests Worldwide

Overview

Journal Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

Specialty Science

Date 2018 Dec 26

PMID 30584087

Citations 35

Authors

Daniel J Wieczynski

Brad Boyle

Vanessa Buzzard

Sandra M Duran

Amanda N Henderson

Catherine M Hulshof

Andrew J Kerkhoff

Megan C McCarthy

Sean T Michaletz

Nathan G Swenson

Gregory P Asner

Lisa Patrick Bentley

Brian J Enquist

Van M Savage

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

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 () functional diversity generally declines with increasing latitude and elevation, () temperature variability and vapor pressure are the strongest drivers of geographic shifts in functional composition and ecological strategies, and () 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.

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