Threshold effects of air pollution and climate change on understory plant communities at forested sites in the eastern United States.

ABSTRACT: Forest understory plant communities in the eastern United States are often diverse and are potentially sensitive to changes in climate and atmospheric inputs of nitrogen caused by air pollution. In recent years, empirical and processed-based mathematical models have been developed to investigate such changes in plant communities. In the study reported here, a robust set of understory vegetation response functions (expressed as version 2 of the Probability of Occurrence of Plant Species model for the United States [US-PROPS v2]) was developed based on observations of forest understory and grassland plant species presence/absence and associated abiotic characteristics derived from spatial datasets. Improvements to the US-PROPS model, relative to version 1, were mostly focused on inclusion of

SUBMITTER: McDonnell TC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8218460 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature