Tree diversity mitigates defoliation after a drought-induced tipping point
| Autor: | Elodie Bay, Bart Muys, Koenraad Van Meerbeek, Quentin Ponette, Geert Sioen, Rita Sousa-Silva, Thomas Van de Peer, Hugues Titeux, Kris Verheyen |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2018 |
| Předmět: |
0106 biological sciences
010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences Biodiversity & Conservation Biodiversity crown condition forest management 01 natural sciences Trees Quercus FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITY Belgium ICP FORESTS Fagus General Environmental Science media_common Global and Planetary Change CLIMATE-CHANGE Forest dynamics Ecology PRODUCTIVITY Agroforestry drought stress MIXED-EFFECTS MODELS WATER AVAILABILITY Tipping point (climatology) Droughts climate change INTERNATIONAL COOPERATIVE PROGRAM FAGUS-SYLVATICA L Biodiversity Conservation Psychological resilience Life Sciences & Biomedicine Food Chain EUROPE media_common.quotation_subject Climate Change Forest management Climate change Environmental Sciences & Ecology 010603 evolutionary biology Environmental Chemistry Herbivory 0105 earth and related environmental sciences Science & Technology Species diversity Environmental science BIODIVERSITY Species richness Environmental Sciences |
| Popis: | Understanding the processes that underlie drought-related tree vitality loss is essential for anticipating future forest dynamics, and for developing management plans aiming at increasing the resilience of forests to climate change. Forest vitality has been continuously monitored in Europe since the acid rain alert in the 1980s, and the intensive monitoring plots of ICP Forests offer the opportunity to investigate the effects of air pollution and climate change on forest condition. By making use of over 100 long-term monitoring plots, where crown defoliation has been assessed extensively since 1990, we discovered a progressive shift from a negative to a positive effect of species richness on forest health. The observed tipping point in the balance of net interactions, from competition to facilitation, has never been reported from real ecosystems outside experimental conditions; and the strong temporal consistency of our observations with increasing drought stress emphasizes its climate change relevance. Furthermore, we show that higher species diversity has reduced the severity of defoliation in the long term. Our results confirm the greater resilience of diverse forests to future climate change-induced stress. More generally, they add to an accumulating body of evidence on the large potential of tree species mixtures to face manifold disturbances in a changing world. ispartof: GLOBAL CHANGE BIOLOGY vol:24 issue:9 pages:4304-4315 ispartof: location:England status: published |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|