A Significant Upward Shift in Plant Species Optimum Elevation During the 20th Century

By Jonathan Lenoir, J. Gégout, Pablo A. Marquet, P. Ruffray, H. Brisse. Science, 2008

2,200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spatial fingerprints of climate change on biotic communities are usually associated with changes in the distribution of species at their latitudinal or altitudinal extremes. By comparing the altitudinal distribution of 171 forest plant species between 1905 and 1985 and 1986 and 2005 along the entire elevation range (0 to 2600 meters above sea level) in west Europe, we show that climate warming has resulted in a significant upward shift in species optimum elevation averaging 29 meters per decade. The shift is larger for species restricted to mountain habitats and for grassy species, which are characterized by faster population turnover. Our study shows that climate change affects the spatial core of the distributional range of plant species, in addition to their distributional margins, as previously reported.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Ecological Modeling, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/63ec848b5023e792bad59d3701c78e2d3ed8cfc1

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Citations in the corpus

Global warming threatens the persistence of Mediterranean brown trout (2012, background): “Global warming is changing the current distribution and abundance of many thermally sensitive species (e. g. Root et al., 2003; Thomas et al., 2004; Lenoir et al., 2008).”
How does climate warming affect plant-pollinator interactions? (2009, background): “Likewise, it is not necessarily the change of distributional extremes of species geographical ranges that matter for their interactions with other species, but rather the change of their optimum or mean distribution (Kelly & Goulden 2008; Lenoir et al. 2008).”
Altitudinal differentiation in growth and phenology among populations of temperate-zone tree species growing in a common garden (2009, background): “The altitudinal distribution of mountain species is already changing as a result of climate warming (Lenoir et al. 2008).”
Climate change threatens European conservation areas (2011, background): “…change and its impacts are being debated worldwide, biologists are finding evidence that across a wide range of taxonomic and functional groups species already are responding to climate change by altering their phenology, and geographical distributions (Hickling et al. 2006; Lenoir et al. 2008).”
Rapid altitudinal migration of mountain plants in Taiwan and its implications for high altitude biodiversity (2012, background): “…changes in temperature are driving migrations of species to higher elevations (Grabherr et al. 1994, Walther et al. 2005, le Roux and McGeoch 2008, Lenoir et al. 2008, Raxworthy et al. 2008, Chen et al. 2009), the potential for migration between mountains is often severely restricted due to the…”
Disentangling the drivers of context‐dependent plant–animal interactions (2014, background): “Currently, much attention has focused on predicting how geographic ranges of organisms might shift to higher latitudes and elevations given warming climate (Hill, Thomas & Huntley 1999; Parmesan 2006; Lenoir et al. 2008; Moritz et al. 2008; Tingley et al. 2009; Crimmins et al. 2011).”
The Mediterranean Sea as a ‘cul‐de‐sac’ for endemic fishes facing climate change (2010, background): “…taxa seeking cooler environments by shifting geographic distributions towards the poles or higher altitudes (Hickling et al., 2005; Parmesan, 2006; Lenoir et al., 2008), (ii) high global extinction rates (Thomas et al., 2001; Cheung et al., 2009), and (iii) marked reorganizations of local…”
Integrating ensemble species distribution modelling and statistical phylogeography to inform projections of climate change impacts on species distributions (2013, background): “Alpine species, with distributions defined by steep climatic gradients, are being disproportionately impacted by these changes (Nogués-Bravo et al. 2007; Lenoir et al. 2008; Engler et al. 2009; Dirnbock et al. 2011).”
Shifts in plant distributions in response to climate warming in a biodiversity hotspot, the Hengduan Mountains (2018, background): “In addition to the most frequently reported types, poleward and upward shifts (Chen et al., 2011; Lenoir et al., 2008; Parmesan & Yohe, 2003), unexpected range shifts are constantly being discovered, such as movements in east–west directions across longitudes (Vanderwal et al., 2013), or shifts…”
Latitudinal gradients as natural laboratories to infer species' responses to temperature (2013, background): “Two main approaches are available to empirically examine the effects of warming on terrestrial organisms: (i) monitoring the response of organisms to temporal or spatial temperature variation, for example, across years, altitudes and/or latitudes (Koch et al. 1995; K€orner 2003, 2007; Ibáñez et al. ”
An elevational shift of cryophilous bryophytes in the last century – an effect of climate warming? (2009, background): “All these traits and qualities render bryophytes excellent pioneer species (Schofield, 1985) and it may be expected that range expansions occur rather quickly when environmental conditions become favourable (see also Frahm & Klaus, 2001; Lenoir et al., 2008).”
Distributional migrations, expansions, and contractions of tropical plant species as revealed in dated herbarium records (2012, background): “…et al., 1999; Konvicka et al., 2003; Walther et al., 2005; Wilson et al., 2005; Hickling et al., 2006; Beckage et al., 2008; Kelly & Goulden, 2008; Lenoir et al., 2008; Moritz et al., 2008; Chen et al., 2011; Correspondence: Kenneth J. Feeley, Department of Biological Sciences, Florida…”
Climate change and elevational range shifts: Evidence from dung beetles in two European mountain ranges (2014, background): “In both regions, climate change could have exceeded the maximum thermal tolerances for cold-adapted species that are restricted to the top of the mountains, consistent with results from organisms in other mountain regions (Wilson et al., 2005; Lenoir et al., 2008; Moritz et al., 2008).”