Older forests function as energetic and demographic refugia for a climate-sensitive species

Tree diversity enhances predation by birds but not by arthropods across climate gradients

“…Following this, an untested prediction is that tree diversity would exert stronger positive effects on predators under challenging climatic conditions (e.g. higher temperatures or frequent droughts) by providing more micro-climatic refugia to sensitive populations and ameliorating abiotic stress to a greater extent in these environments (Betts et al, 2018;McGinn et al, 2023;Schnabel et al, 2023). Because of the scale at which most work has been conducted, the majority of experimental studies conducted so far have been unable to test for the joint and interactive impacts of tree diversity and macroclimatic variation on predation (Nell et al, 2018;Romero et al, 2018;Yang et al, 2018), thus limiting our understanding of taxon-specific responses to tree diversity and its abiotic contingency at a macro-ecological scale.…”