Dataset Information

Climate legacies drive the distribution and future restoration potential of dryland forests.

ABSTRACT: Knowing the extent and environmental drivers of forests is key to successfully restore degraded ecosystems, and to mitigate climate change and desertification impacts using tree planting. Water availability is the main limiting factor for the development of forests in drylands, yet the importance of groundwater resources and palaeoclimate as drivers of their current distribution has been neglected. Here we report that mid-Holocene climates and aquifer trends are key predictors of the distribution of dryland forests worldwide. We also updated the global extent of dryland forests to 1,283 million hectares and showed that failing to consider past climates and aquifers has resulted in ignoring or misplacing up to 130 million hectares of forests in drylands. Our findings highlight the importance of a wetter past and well-preserved aquifers to explain the current distribution of dryland forests, and can guide restoration actions by avoiding unsuitable areas for tree establishment in a drier world.

SUBMITTER: Guirado E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7613308 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Climate legacies drive the distribution and future restoration potential of dryland forests.

Guirado Emilio E Delgado-Baquerizo Manuel M Martínez-Valderrama Jaime J Tabik Siham S Alcaraz-Segura Domingo D Maestre Fernando T FT

Nature plants 20220725 8

Knowing the extent and environmental drivers of forests is key to successfully restore degraded ecosystems, and to mitigate climate change and desertification impacts using tree planting. Water availability is the main limiting factor for the development of forests in drylands, yet the importance of groundwater resources and palaeoclimate as drivers of their current distribution has been neglected. Here we report that mid-Holocene climates and aquifer trends are key predictors of the distributio ...[more]

PMID: 35879606

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Project description:Disturbance legacies structure communities and ecological memory, but due to increasing changes in disturbance regimes, it is becoming more difficult to characterize disturbance legacies or determine how long they persist. We sought to quantify the characteristics and persistence of material legacies (e.g., biotic residuals of disturbance) that arise from variation in fire severity in an eastern ponderosa pine forest in North America. We compared forest stand structure and understory woody plant and bird community composition and species richness across unburned, low-, moderate-, and high-severity burn patches in a 27-year-old mixed-severity wildfire that had received minimal post-fire management. We identified distinct tree densities (high: 14.3 ± 7.4 trees per ha, moderate: 22.3 ± 12.6, low: 135.3 ± 57.1, unburned: 907.9 ± 246.2) and coarse woody debris cover (high: 8.5 ± 1.6% cover per 30 m transect, moderate: 4.3 ± 0.7, low: 2.3 ± 0.6, unburned: 1.0 ± 0.4) among burn severities. Understory woody plant communities differed between high-severity patches, moderate- and low-severity patches, and unburned patches (all p < 0.05). Bird communities differed between high- and moderate-severity patches, low-severity patches, and unburned patches (all p < 0.05). Bird species richness varied across burn severities: low-severity patches had the highest (5.29 ± 1.44) and high-severity patches had the lowest (2.87 ± 0.72). Understory woody plant richness was highest in unburned (5.93 ± 1.10) and high-severity (5.07 ± 1.17) patches, and it was lower in moderate- (3.43 ± 1.17) and low-severity (3.43 ± 1.06) patches. We show material fire legacies persisted decades after the mixed-severity wildfire in eastern ponderosa forest, fostering distinct structures, communities, and species in burned versus unburned patches and across fire severities. At a patch scale, eastern and western ponderosa system responses to mixed-severity fires were consistent.

Dataset Information

Climate legacies drive the distribution and future restoration potential of dryland forests.

Publications

Climate legacies drive the distribution and future restoration potential of dryland forests.

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