Evidence of tree species' range shifts in a complex landscape.

ABSTRACT: Climate change is expected to change the distribution of species. For long-lived, sessile species such as trees, tracking the warming climate depends on seedling colonization of newly favorable areas. We compare the distribution of seedlings and mature trees for all but the rarest tree species in California, Oregon and Washington, United States of America, a large, environmentally diverse region. Across 46 species, the mean annual temperature of the range of seedlings was 0.120°C colder than that of the range of trees (95% confidence interval from 0.096 to 0.144°C). The extremes of the seedling distributions also shifted towards colder temperature than those of mature trees, but the change was less pronounced. Although the mean elevation and mean latitude of the range of seedlings was high

SUBMITTER: Monleon VJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4310600 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature