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Disturbance and climate microrefugia mediate tree range shifts during climate change

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Abstract

Context

Many tree species will shift their distribution as the climate continues to change. To assess species’ range changes, modeling efforts often rely on climatic predictors, sometimes incorporating biotic interactions (e.g. competition or facilitation), but without integrating topographic complexity or the dynamics of disturbance and forest succession.

Objectives

We investigated the role of ‘safe islands’ of establishment (“microrefugia”) in conjunction with disturbance and succession, on mediating range shifts.

Methods

We simulated eight tree species and multiple disturbances across an artificial landscape designed to highlight variation in topographic complexity. Specifically, we simulated spatially explicit successional changes for a 100-year period of climate warming under different scenarios of disturbance and climate microrefugia.

Results

Disturbance regimes play a major role in mediating species range changes. The effects of disturbance range from expediting range contractions for some species to facilitating colonization of new ranges for others. Microrefugia generally had a significant but smaller effect on range changes. The existence of microrefugia could enhance range persistence but implies increased environmental heterogeneity, thereby hampering migration under some disturbance regimes and for species with low dispersal capabilities. Species that gained suitable habitat due to climate change largely depended on the interaction between species life history traits, environmental heterogeneity and disturbance regimes to expand their ranges.

Conclusions

Disturbance and microrefugia play a key role in determining forest range shifts during climate change. The study highlights the urgent need of including non-deterministic successional pathways into climate change projections of species distributions.

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Acknowledgments

We received funding support from the National Science Foundation’s Macrosystems Biology Program, Collaborative award NSF #EF-1065826 to JF, and thank our collaborators (F. Davis – Principal Investigator, A. Flint, L. Flint, A. Hall, L. Hannah, I. McCullough, M. Moritz, M. North, K. Redmond, H. Regan, L. Sweet). We also thank the comments from two anonymous reviewers that greatly improved this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 875302, Tempe, AZ, 85287-5302, USA

    Josep M. Serra-Diaz & Janet Franklin

  2. Department of Environmental Science and Management, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, OR, 97207, USA

    Robert M. Scheller

  3. Conservation Biology Institute, La Mesa, CA, USA

    Alexandra D. Syphard

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  1. Josep M. Serra-Diaz
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  2. Robert M. Scheller
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  3. Alexandra D. Syphard
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Correspondence to Josep M. Serra-Diaz.

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Serra-Diaz, J.M., Scheller, R.M., Syphard, A.D. et al. Disturbance and climate microrefugia mediate tree range shifts during climate change. Landscape Ecol 30, 1039–1053 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-015-0173-9

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