Trends in evergreen oak suitability from assembled species distribution models: assessing climate change in south-western Europe

Abstract

Questions: Will evergreen oaks be harmed or favoured by the expected global change? How could they interact? What is the trend along the twenty-first century regarding dominance or codominance among evergreen oaks? Location: Western Europe. Methods:We analysed four evergreen oaks (Quercus ilex subsp. ilex, Q. ilex subsp. ballota, Q. suber and Q. coccifera) by means of Species Distribution Models (SDMs). Three algorithms were used: Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt), Logistic Regression (LR) and Environmental Distance (EnvDis). Taxa occurrences were taken especially from the National Forests Inventories (NFI), whereas environmental data was retrieved from WorldClim 1.4 project. Present period and four

Effect of climate change on potential distribution of Cedrus libani A. Rich in the twenty-first century: an Ecological Niche Modeling assessment

“…Factors that are correlated with altitude seem to be the most significant (Körner 2007). This is consistent with other tree species studied in the Mediterranean basin (López-Tirado et al 2018). Habitat suitability area results wider in the forecasted scenarios than in the present period.…”

“…Thirteen GCMs calibrated for the Northern Hemisphere and 6 different algorithms were used. This methodology has already been proven and achieved previously (López-Tirado et al 2018). Goodness of fit of the models was executed by the AUC showing disparate scores and only two algorithms displayed a value under 0.7 (Table 3), i.e.…”

“…Other algorithms were considered at the beginning such as Niche Mosaic, Bioclim and Environmental Niche Factor Analysis (ENFA), but then dismissed because of non-reliable results in AUC values. A consensus map across the six algorithms was built following the equation (Vessella et al 2015(Vessella et al , 2017López-Tirado et al 2018): where X pond is the weighted probability of habitat suitability, z i is the probability of the potential occurrence of the cell of the i-model and AUC i is the Area Under the Curve.…”

Disentangling the climatic and biotic factors driving changes in the dynamics of Quercus suber populations across the species‘ latitudinal range

“…Our data suggest the urgent need for additional, more exhaustive sampling of P. cinnamomi abundances across Q. suber 's range to accurately determine the magnitude of the pathogen problem. Most studies analysing forest declining trends are based on inventory data and focus mainly on climatic and stand density effects (Fan et al, ; López‐Tirado et al, ). Our data corroborate the relevance of these factors, but also highlight the importance of including biotic interactions on these studies, since pathogen abundance played a key role in determining the demographic structure, defoliation and mortality levels of Q. suber populations.…”

“…The Mediterranean region is expected to be one of the most vulnerable to global change over the coming decades due to a combination of different pressures (Giorgi & Lionello, ). However, despite the rising number of modelling studies aiming to predict consequences of global change for tree species distributions (Correia, Bugalho, Franco, & Palmeirim, ; López‐Tirado, Vessella, Schirone, & Hidalgo, ), potential trajectories for the future dynamics of typical Mediterranean forests such as oak forests remain largely uncertain (Acácio, Dias, Catry, Rocha, & Moreira, ; Lindner et al, ). Among oaks, this uncertainty is particularly true for cork oak ( Quercus suber L.) (Vessella, López‐Tirado, Simeone, Schirone, & Hidalgo, ).…”