“Humanity’s responsibility to the rest of life and to future generations is clear: bring with us as much of the environment and biodiversity through the bottleneck as possible.”—Edward O. Wilson, from the introduction to The Diversity of Life, 2001.
Abstract
The central aim of this study is to estimate the current potential distribution of Turkey’s forests and their composition in absence of anthropogenic landcover change, and in this manner to contribute to past studies on the distribution of European forest taxa by filling an important spatial gap. For our simulations, we used high resolution climate data from ERA5-Land and a process based dynamic regional to global vegetation model (LPJ-GUESS), for which we modified the original European tree species list to match the climatic sensitivities that the species in turn exhibit throughout their natural ranges in Turkey, alternating between subspecies where necessary. This is the first application of LPJ-GUESS for the entire country using high resolution climate data. We defined the climatic tolerances for the model of three conifer species with wide distribution in Turkey: Pinus nigra, Pinus brutia, and Cedrus libani. We first identified relative bioclimatic tolerances of species for Turkey by way of comparing their current recorded distributions to ERA5-Land reanalysis data using observation data from the General Directorate of Forestry of Turkey, and later through ensemble runs with LPJ-GUESS we finetuned their parameters. Finally, we compared simulated net primary production to MODIS remote sensing observation estimates. In general, LPJ-GUESS captured the natural distribution ranges of different forest taxa, especially after the introduction of three additional species native to Turkey, highlighting competition for resources. Due to probable regional acclimatization of species, our final set of parameters for the different plant functional types offers a suitable alternative for future studies.
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The R codes generated or used during the study are part of an ongoing study, and are available in limited form from the corresponding author by request.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Ünal Akkemik and Nesibe Köse and members of DendroClub for their kind inputs in the verification of our species distribution results, Thomas Hickler for his valuable feedback, input and constructive criticism during our final editing phase, Istem Fer for her continuous support especially at the initial phase of the model setup, and Johan Nord for being there when we needed further guidance with LPJ-GUESS. We would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their careful evaluation of the manuscript, and their valuable comments and questions.
Funding
This study has been produced benefiting from the 2232 International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers Program of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) through Grant 118C329. The financial support received from TUBITAK does not mean that the content of the publication is approved in a scientific sense by TUBITAK. Computing resources used in this work were provided by the National Center for High Performance Computing (UHeM) in Turkey, under Grant Number 1007482020.
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All authors, within their fields of expertise, contributed to the study conception and design. Initial model acquisition, preparation, data collection for simulations, and analysis were conducted by Bikem Ekberzade, who also prepared the figures and wrote the paper. Omer Lutfi Sen and H. Nüzhet Dalfes supervised and coordinated the research project. Omer Lutfi Sen, H. Nüzhet Dalfes and Ömer Yetemen provided feedback throughout the writing phase while Ömer Yetemen was awarded the funding to conduct this research. All authors participated in revisions and have read and approved the final version of the manuscript.
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Ekberzade, B., Yetemen, O., Sen, O.L. et al. Simulating the potential forest ranges in an old land: the case for Turkey’s forests. Biodivers Conserv 31, 3217–3236 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-022-02485-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-022-02485-8