Climate-related range shifts of Ardisia japonica in the Korean Peninsula: a role of dispersal capacity

Abstract

Background: Many studies about climate-related range shift of plants have focused on understanding the relationship between climatic factors and plant distributions. However, consideration of adaptation factors, such as dispersal and plant physiological processes, is necessary for a more accurate prediction. This study predicted the future distribution of marlberry (Ardisia japonica), a warm-adapted evergreen broadleaved shrub, under climate change in relation to the dispersal ability that is determined by elapsed time for the first seed production. Results: We introduced climate change data under four representative concentration pathway (RCP 2.6, 4.5, 6.0, and 8.5) scenarios from five different global circulation models (GCMs) to simulate the future distributions (2041~2060) of marlberry. Using these 20 different climate data, ensemble forecasts were produced by averaging the future distributions of marlberry in order to minimize the model uncertainties. Then, a dispersal-limited function was applied to the ensemble forecast in order to exam the impact of dispersal capacity on future marlberry distributions. In the dispersal-limited function, elapsed time for the first seed production and possible dispersal distances define the dispersal capacity. The results showed that the current suitable habitats of marlberry expanded toward central coast and southern inland area from the current southern and mid-eastern coast area in Korea. However, given the dispersal-limited function, this experiment showed lower expansions to the central coast area and southern inland area. Conclusions: This study well explains the importance of dispersal capacity in the prediction of future marlberry distribution and can be used as basic information in understanding the climate change effects on the future distributions of Ardisia japonica.

Assessing Climate Change Impact on Forest Habitat Suitability and Diversity in the Korean Peninsula

“…First, since only one GCM and SDM were used, the uncertainties of the data and models remained. However, since our results are highly similar with the results of other ensemble studies, it is considered that it is enough to explain future conditions [16,17,28]. Also, SDM studies at the macro or regional level have structural limitations that do not reflect microclimate variability or specific small-scale habitat attributes.…”

“…The estimation of habitat suitability of the three forest types for the baseline period was similar to that of many previous research studies and surveys [16,17,50,51]. In the case of warm temperate evergreen forest, suitable areas were found in Jeju Island and the southern coast of the Korean Peninsula (Figure 3).…”

“…Most previous studies on future forest distributions in the Korean Peninsula show detailed changes based on individual species changes, whereas this study predicted overall changes through representative forest types [13,16,17,24,53]. Nevertheless, our results on habitat suitability of subalpine forest showed a decrease as in Koo et al [52]'s study, habitat suitability of warm temperate forests increased as in studies of Park et al [16] and Koo et al [28], and spatial distributions also showed the same patterns. This suggests that the same results can be achieved by simulating group level forest types, without taking into account the growth characteristics of individual species, and this may be effective in studying regions where data is lacking, such as North Korea.…”

“…SDM finds suitable growth areas for the changing environment through the past occurrence data of species. The representative tools for the SDM are maximum entropy (MaxEnt), generalized linear model (GLM), generalized additive model (GAM), and random forest (RF) [11,[16][17][18].…”

Potential impact of climate change on the species richness of subalpine plant species in the mountain national parks of South Korea

“…The impacts of climate change on the biodiversity of South Korea have been studied for several years, but most of the studies focused on the distribution of warm-adapted evergreen plants, which are mostly abundant in low altitude (Park et al 2016a(Park et al , 2016bPark et al 2017;Shin et al 2018). Koo et al (2015) studied the distribution of cold-tolerant broad-leaved plants, but it could not determine site-specific species richness.…”