A physiological analogy of the niche for projecting the potential distribution of plants |
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Authors: | Steven I. Higgins Robert B. O’Hara Olga Bykova Michael D. Cramer Isabelle Chuine Eva‐Maria Gerstner Thomas Hickler Xavier Morin Michael R. Kearney Guy F. Midgley Simon Scheiter |
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Affiliation: | 1. Institut für Physische Geographie, Goethe Universit?t Frankfurt am Main, 60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany;2. Biodiversit?t und Klima Forschungszentrum (BiK‐F), Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, 60325 Frankfurt am Main, Germany;3. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 3B2, Canada;4. Department of Botany, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa;5. Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive — CNRS, 34293 Montpellier Cedex 05, France;6. Department of Environmental Sciences, Forest Ecology, Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems, ETH Zürich, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland;7. Department of Zoology, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Vic. 3010, Australia;8. Climate Change Research Group, Kirstenbosch Research Centre, South African National Biodiversity Institute, Claremont, Cape Town 7735, South Africa |
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Abstract: | Aim To develop a physiologically based model of the plant niche for use in species distribution modelling. Location Europe. Methods We link the Thornley transport resistance (TTR) model with functions which describe how the TTR’s model parameters are influenced by abiotic environmental factors. The TTR model considers how carbon and nutrient uptake, and the allocation of these assimilates, influence growth. We use indirect statistical methods to estimate the model parameters from a high resolution data set on tree distribution for 22 European tree species. Results We infer, from distribution data and abiotic forcing data, the physiological niche dimensions of 22 European tree species. We found that the model fits were reasonable (AUC: 0.79–0.964). The projected distributions were characterized by a false positive rate of 0.19 and a false negative rate 0.12. The fitted models are used to generate projections of the environmental factors that limit the range boundaries of the study species. Main conclusions We show that physiological models can be used to derive physiological niche dimensions from species distribution data. Future work should focus on including prior information on physiological rates into the parameter estimation process. Application of the TTR model to species distribution modelling suggests new avenues for establishing explicit links between distribution and physiology, and for generating hypotheses about how ecophysiological processes influence the distribution of plants. |
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Keywords: | Climate envelope modelling European tree species indirect statistical methods mechanistic niche model niche physiological model species distribution model Thornley transport resistance |
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