Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 367, Issue 1606, Pages 3100-3114Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0074
Keywords
demographic buffering; climate change; integral projection model; periodic population matrix model; precipitation; stochastic population growth rate (lambda(S))
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [IBN95-27833]
- CTL Fellowship
- Binns-Williams Funds
- Forrest Shreve Desert Ecology Award (Ecological Society of America)
- Sigma Xi
- Lewis & Clark Funds for Exploratory Field Research (American Philosophical Society)
- Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
- German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)
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Desert species respond strongly to infrequent, intense pulses of precipitation. Consequently, indigenous flora has developed a rich repertoire of life-history strategies to deal with fluctuations in resource availability. Examinations of how future climate change will affect the biota often forecast negative impacts, but these-usually correlative-approaches overlook precipitation variation because they are based on averages. Here, we provide an overview of how variable precipitation affects perennial and annual desert plants, and then implement an innovative, mechanistic approach to examine the effects of precipitation on populations of two desert plant species. This approach couples robust climatic projections, including variable precipitation, with stochastic, stage-structured models constructed from long-term demographic datasets of the short-lived Cryptantha flava in the Colorado Plateau Desert (USA) and the annual Carrichtera annua in the Negev Desert (Israel). Our results highlight these populations' potential to buffer future stochastic precipitation. Population growth rates in both species increased under future conditions: wetter, longer growing seasons for Cryptantha and drier years for Carrichtera. We determined that such changes are primarily due to survival and size changes for Cryptantha and the role of seed bank for Carrichtera. Our work suggests that desert plants, and thus the resources they provide, might be more resilient to climate change than previously thought.
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