Journal
FUNCTIONAL ECOLOGY
Volume 29, Issue 1, Pages 5-14Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.12304
Keywords
climate change; initial temperature; plant distribution; seed germination; temperature gradient
Categories
Funding
- FORKAST project [TP 12 Poschlod]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
1. Reproductive stages of life cycle are important for the explanation of distribution patterns of plant species at different scales, due to their extreme vulnerability to environmental conditions. Despite reported evidences that seed germination is related to habitat macroclimatic characteristics such as mean annual temperature (MAT) and precipitation, the role of this trait in controlling plant species distribution is not systematically and quantitatively evaluated yet. Using the data on seed germination along a temperature gradient for 49 species originating from contrasting climatic conditions, we test here whether initial temperature of seed germination (T-min) is a direct correlate for predicting species distribution ranges along the temperature gradient. Our study reveals that T-min is strongly negatively correlated with habitat temperature; among the studied species, T-min clearly increased with decreasing MAT (r(2)=057, P<0001). Considering phylogenetic biases, co-evolution of seed traits as well as precipitation along with microclimatic factors did not affect the strength of this relationship. The results suggest that the T-min-MAT relation can provide insights particularly into species distribution patterns, vegetation dynamics and community assembly rules along altitudinal and latitudinal gradients. We argue that including the T-min in species distribution models may help to improve the accuracy and specificity of predictions of vegetation shifts under global change scenarios.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available