Dataset Information

Pushing the pace of tree species migration.

ABSTRACT: Plants and animals have responded to past climate changes by migrating with habitable environments, sometimes shifting the boundaries of their geographic ranges by tens of kilometers per year or more. Species migrating in response to present climate conditions, however, must contend with landscapes fragmented by anthropogenic disturbance. We consider this problem in the context of wind-dispersed tree species. Mechanisms of long-distance seed dispersal make these species capable of rapid migration rates. Models of species-front migration suggest that even tree species with the capacity for long-distance dispersal will be unable to keep pace with future spatial changes in temperature gradients, exclusive of habitat fragmentation effects. Here we present a numerical model that captures the salient dynamics of migration by long-distance dispersal for a generic tree species. We then use the model to explore the possible effects of assisted colonization within a fragmented landscape under a simulated tree-planting scheme. Our results suggest that an assisted-colonization program could accelerate species-front migration rates enough to match the speed of climate change, but such a program would involve an environmental-sustainability intervention at a massive scale.

SUBMITTER: Lazarus ED

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4146538 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Pushing the pace of tree species migration.

Lazarus Eli D ED McGill Brian J BJ

PloS one 20140827 8

Plants and animals have responded to past climate changes by migrating with habitable environments, sometimes shifting the boundaries of their geographic ranges by tens of kilometers per year or more. Species migrating in response to present climate conditions, however, must contend with landscapes fragmented by anthropogenic disturbance. We consider this problem in the context of wind-dispersed tree species. Mechanisms of long-distance seed dispersal make these species capable of rapid migratio ...[more]

PMID: 25162663

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Project description:Boreal forests are experiencing dramatic climate change, having warmed 1.0°-1.9°C over the last century. Yet forest regeneration practices are often still dictated by a fixed seed zone framework, in which seeds are both harvested from and planted into predefined areas. Our goal was to determine whether seedlings sourced from southern seed zones in Minnesota USA are already better adapted to northerly seed zones because of climate change. Bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) and northern red oak (Quercus rubra) seedlings from two seed zones (i.e., tree ecotypes) were planted into 16 sites in two northern seed zones and measured for 3 yr. Our hypotheses were threefold: (1) tree species with more southern geographic distributions would thrive in northern forests where climate has already warmed substantially, (2) southern ecotypes of these species would have higher survival and growth than the northern ecotype in northern environments, and (3) natural selection would favor seedlings that expressed phenotypic and phenological traits characteristic of trees sourced from the more southern seed zone. For both species, survival was high (>93%), and southern ecotypes expressed traits consistent with our climate adaptation hypotheses. Ecotypic differences were especially evident for red oak; the southern ecotype had had higher survival, lower specific leaf area (SLA), faster height and diameter growth, and extended leaf phenology relative to the northern ecotype. Bur oak results were weaker, but the southern ecotype also had earlier budburst and lower SLA than the northern ecotype. Models based on the fixed seed zones failed to explain seedling performance as well as those with continuous predictors (e.g., climate and geographical position), suggesting that plant adaptations within current seed zone delineations do align with changing climate conditions. Adding support for this conclusion, natural selection favored traits expressed by the more southern tree ecotypes. Collectively, these results suggest that state seed sourcing guidelines should be reexamined to permit plantings across seed zones, a form of assisted migration. More extensive experiments (i.e., provenance trails) are necessary to make species-specific seed transfer guidelines that account for climate trends while also considering the precise geographic origin of seed sources.

Project description:An international data science challenge, called National Ecological Observatory Network-National Institute of Standards and Technology data science evaluation, was set up in autumn 2017 with the goal to improve the use of remote sensing data in ecological applications. The competition was divided into three tasks: (1) individual tree crown (ITC) delineation, for identifying the location and size of individual trees; (2) alignment between field surveyed trees and ITCs delineated on remote sensing data; and (3) tree species classification. In this paper, the methods and results of team Fondazione Edmund Mach (FEM) are presented. The ITC delineation (Task 1 of the challenge) was done using a region growing method applied to a near-infrared band of the hyperspectral images. The optimization of the parameters of the delineation algorithm was done in a supervised way on the basis of the Jaccard score using the training set provided by the organizers. The alignment (Task 2) between the delineated ITCs and the field surveyed trees was done using the Euclidean distance among the position, the height, and the crown radius of the ITCs and the field surveyed trees. The classification (Task 3) was performed using a support vector machine classifier applied to a selection of the hyperspectral bands and the canopy height model. The selection of the bands was done using the sequential forward floating selection method and the Jeffries Matusita distance. The results of the three tasks were very promising: team FEM ranked first in the data science competition in Task 1 and 2, and second in Task 3. The Jaccard score of the delineated crowns was 0.3402, and the results showed that the proposed approach delineated both small and large crowns. The alignment was correctly done for all the test samples. The classification results were good (overall accuracy of 88.1%, kappa accuracy of 75.7%, and mean class accuracy of 61.5%), although the accuracy was biased toward the most represented species.

Dataset Information

Pushing the pace of tree species migration.

Publications

Pushing the pace of tree species migration.

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