What is it about?
Predicting how climate change will impact the species around us is a major challenge for ecology. To make these predictions, scientists often use space-for-time substitution -- this means that they use what we know about species in warmer places to make predictions about what might happen to species in cooler places when temperatures rise. We decided to test whether this method accurately predicts how a widespread tree species in the western US, ponderosa pine, has responded to climate change over the past 35 years. We show that space-for-time substitution not only fails this test, but it gives us directionally incorrect answers. This means that scientists need to reconsider how we predict and plan for the ecological impacts of climate change.
Featured Image
Photo by Katie Musial on Unsplash
Why is it important?
We show that space-for-time substitution fails to predict tree growth responses to recent climate change, and in fact gives directionally incorrect predictions. This is problematic because space-for-time substitution is widely used in all sorts of climate impact and conservation decision-making. Our findings suggest that scientists need to reconsider how we predict and plan for the ecological impacts of climate change, and take better advantage of ecological timeseries data where they exist.
Perspectives
Ponderosa pine is a widespread tree species that is emblematic of much of western North America. While collecting data for this article, I traveled all over the western US and spent tons of time in ponderosa forests in a huge range of different environments. Our results suggest that this species is vulnerable across much of its range, to an extent we may not have fully appreciated before. I hope that this work can help researchers and managers protect not only the rare and restricted species that often get lots of attention, but also more common and widespread species like ponderosa pine that characterize the landscapes we all value and love.
Daniel Perret
ORISE, US Forest Service
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A species’ response to spatial climatic variation does not predict its response to climate change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2304404120.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
