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      Divergence of species responses to climate change

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          Abstract

          Traits determine species responses to climate change, as most eastern U.S. trees shift westward following moisture change.

          Abstract

          Climate change can have profound impacts on biodiversity and the sustainability of many ecosystems. Various studies have investigated the impacts of climate change, but large-scale, trait-specific impacts are less understood. We analyze abundance data over time for 86 tree species/groups across the eastern United States spanning the last three decades. We show that more tree species have experienced a westward shift (73%) than a poleward shift (62%) in their abundance, a trend that is stronger for saplings than adult trees. The observed shifts are primarily due to the changes of subpopulation abundances in the leading edges and are significantly associated with changes in moisture availability and successional processes. These spatial shifts are associated with species that have similar traits (drought tolerance, wood density, and seed weight) and evolutionary histories (most angiosperms shifted westward and most gymnosperms shifted poleward). Our results indicate that changes in moisture availability have stronger near-term impacts on vegetation dynamics than changes in temperature. The divergent responses to climate change by trait- and phylogenetic-specific groups could lead to changes in composition of forest ecosystems, putting the resilience and sustainability of various forest ecosystems in question.

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          Most cited references36

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          Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change

          Ecological changes in the phenology and distribution of plants and animals are occurring in all well-studied marine, freshwater, and terrestrial groups. These observed changes are heavily biased in the directions predicted from global warming and have been linked to local or regional climate change through correlations between climate and biological variation, field and laboratory experiments, and physiological research. Range-restricted species, particularly polar and mountaintop species, show severe range contractions and have been the first groups in which entire species have gone extinct due to recent climate change. Tropical coral reefs and amphibians have been most negatively affected. Predator-prey and plant-insect interactions have been disrupted when interacting species have responded differently to warming. Evolutionary adaptations to warmer conditions have occurred in the interiors of species' ranges, and resource use and dispersal have evolved rapidly at expanding range margins. Observed genetic shifts modulate local effects of climate change, but there is little evidence that they will mitigate negative effects at the species level.
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            Testing for phylogenetic signal in comparative data: behavioral traits are more labile.

            The primary rationale for the use of phylogenetically based statistical methods is that phylogenetic signal, the tendency for related species to resemble each other, is ubiquitous. Whether this assertion is true for a given trait in a given lineage is an empirical question, but general tools for detecting and quantifying phylogenetic signal are inadequately developed. We present new methods for continuous-valued characters that can be implemented with either phylogenetically independent contrasts or generalized least-squares models. First, a simple randomization procedure allows one to test the null hypothesis of no pattern of similarity among relatives. The test demonstrates correct Type I error rate at a nominal alpha = 0.05 and good power (0.8) for simulated datasets with 20 or more species. Second, we derive a descriptive statistic, K, which allows valid comparisons of the amount of phylogenetic signal across traits and trees. Third, we provide two biologically motivated branch-length transformations, one based on the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) model of stabilizing selection, the other based on a new model in which character evolution can accelerate or decelerate (ACDC) in rate (e.g., as may occur during or after an adaptive radiation). Maximum likelihood estimation of the OU (d) and ACDC (g) parameters can serve as tests for phylogenetic signal because an estimate of d or g near zero implies that a phylogeny with little hierarchical structure (a star) offers a good fit to the data. Transformations that improve the fit of a tree to comparative data will increase power to detect phylogenetic signal and may also be preferable for further comparative analyses, such as of correlated character evolution. Application of the methods to data from the literature revealed that, for trees with 20 or more species, 92% of traits exhibited significant phylogenetic signal (randomization test), including behavioral and ecological ones that are thought to be relatively evolutionarily malleable (e.g., highly adaptive) and/or subject to relatively strong environmental (nongenetic) effects or high levels of measurement error. Irrespective of sample size, most traits (but not body size, on average) showed less signal than expected given the topology, branch lengths, and a Brownian motion model of evolution (i.e., K was less than one), which may be attributed to adaptation and/or measurement error in the broad sense (including errors in estimates of phenotypes, branch lengths, and topology). Analysis of variance of log K for all 121 traits (from 35 trees) indicated that behavioral traits exhibit lower signal than body size, morphological, life-history, or physiological traits. In addition, physiological traits (corrected for body size) showed less signal than did body size itself. For trees with 20 or more species, the estimated OU (25% of traits) and/or ACDC (40%) transformation parameter differed significantly from both zero and unity, indicating that a hierarchical tree with less (or occasionally more) structure than the original better fit the data and so could be preferred for comparative analyses.
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              A significant upward shift in plant species optimum elevation during the 20th century.

              Spatial fingerprints of climate change on biotic communities are usually associated with changes in the distribution of species at their latitudinal or altitudinal extremes. By comparing the altitudinal distribution of 171 forest plant species between 1905 and 1985 and 1986 and 2005 along the entire elevation range (0 to 2600 meters above sea level) in west Europe, we show that climate warming has resulted in a significant upward shift in species optimum elevation averaging 29 meters per decade. The shift is larger for species restricted to mountain habitats and for grassy species, which are characterized by faster population turnover. Our study shows that climate change affects the spatial core of the distributional range of plant species, in addition to their distributional margins, as previously reported.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Sci Adv
                Sci Adv
                SciAdv
                advances
                Science Advances
                American Association for the Advancement of Science
                2375-2548
                May 2017
                17 May 2017
                : 3
                : 5
                : e1603055
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA.
                [2 ]Purdue Climate Change Research Center, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA.
                [3 ]Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA.
                [4 ]U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Southern Research Station, Knoxville, TN 37919, USA.
                [5 ]Department of Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries, University of Tennessee, TN 37996, USA.
                Author notes
                [* ]Corresponding author. Email: sfei@ 123456purdue.edu
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2772-0166
                Article
                1603055
                10.1126/sciadv.1603055
                5435420
                28560343
                705d23d2-a360-42e8-b8be-29b58f5d61d6
                Copyright © 2017, The Authors

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.

                History
                : 04 December 2016
                : 15 March 2017
                Funding
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100005825, National Institute of Food and Agriculture;
                Award ID: ID0EH2BG16710
                Award ID: 2013-38420-20517
                Award Recipient :
                Categories
                Research Article
                Research Articles
                SciAdv r-articles
                Climate Change
                Custom metadata
                Judith Urtula

                climate change,range shift,abundance,functional traits,phylogeny,successsion,drought,forest ecosystem

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