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ABSTRACT In order to better predict climate change effects on plants and their communities, we need to improve our understanding of how various plant traits and community properties respond to warming, as well as what contexts contribute to variation in these responses. To address this knowledge gap, we compiled data from 126 in situ passive experimental warming studies on 13 different plant trait and community property responses. We then collected metadata from these studies to define 9 different study contexts spanning environmental, experimental, and plant‐level scales. We find that, globally, some traits decrease when warmed (e.g., aboveground N content), while others increase (e.g., plant biomass). We also identify contexts that contribute to variation in plant responses to warming, such as latitude, distance from northern range edge, and plant functional group, but the importance of these contexts varies based on the trait or community property measured. For example, as latitude increases, the effect of warming on reproductive traits becomes stronger, but this latitude‐trait relationship did not hold for all traits. Our study highlights how multiple plant traits and community properties respond to warming across the globe, the importance of carefully designing and interpreting the outcomes of climate change experiments, and the need for coordinated warming experiments across varying environmental contexts in order to mechanistically understand and predict plant community responses to climate warming.
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The Wind Niche: The Thermal and Hydric Effects of Wind Speed on Terrestrial Organisms
Synopsis Wind can significantly influence heat and water exchange between organisms and their environment, yet microclimatic variation in wind is often overlooked in models forecasting the effects of environmental change on organismal performance. Accounting for the effects of wind may become even more critical given the anticipated changes in wind speed across the planet as climates continue to warm. In this study, we first assessed how wind speed varies across the planet and how wind speed may change under climate warming at macroclimatic scales. We also used microclimatic data to assess how wind speed changes temporally throughout the day and year as well as the relationship between wind speed, temperature, and standard deviation in each environmental variable using data from weather stations in North America. Finally, we used a suite of biophysical simulations to understand how wind speed (and its interactions with other environmental variables and organismal traits) affects the temperatures and rates of water loss that plants and animals experience at a microclimatic scale. We found substantial latitudinal variation in wind speed and the change in wind speed under climate change, demonstrating that temperate regions are predicted to experience simultaneous warming and reductions in wind speed. From the microclimatic data, we also found that wind speed is positively associated with temperature and temperature variability, indicating that the effects of wind speed may become more challenging to predict under future warming scenarios. The biophysical simulations demonstrated that convective and evaporative cooling from wind interacts strongly with organismal traits (such as body size, solar absorptance, and conductance) and the heating effects of solar radiation to shape heat and water fluxes in terrestrial plants and animals. In many cases, the effect of wind (or its interaction with other variables) was comparable to the effects of air temperature or solar radiation. Understanding these effects will be important for predicting the ecological impacts of climate change and for explaining clinal variation in traits that have evolved across a range of thermal environments.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2401987
- PAR ID:
- 10643172
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Integrative And Comparative Biology
- Volume:
- 65
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1540-7063
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1024-1035
- Size(s):
- p. 1024-1035
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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