Modelling understorey dynamics in temperate forests under global change-Challenges and perspectives.

ABSTRACT: The understorey harbours a substantial part of vascular plant diversity in temperate forests and plays an important functional role, affecting ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling and overstorey regeneration. Global change, however, is putting these understorey communities on trajectories of change, potentially altering and reducing their functioning in the future. Developing mitigation strategies to safeguard the diversity and functioning of temperate forests in the future is challenging and requires improved predictive capacity. Process-based models that predict understorey community composition over time, based on first principles of ecology, have the potential to guide mitigation endeavours but such approaches are rare. Here, we review fourteen understorey modelling approaches

SUBMITTER: Landuyt D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5884426 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature