Speaker
Description
To understand the impact of climate change on plant communities, ecologists often rely on historical baseline data on biodiversity across biomes and its relationship with the climatic environment. Predictions of changes in plant communities under ongoing climate change are often based on monthly bioclimatic variables, such as those provided by the WorldClim datasets, at relatively coarse spatial resolutions. However, these climate variables fail to capture the fine-scale microenvironmental variability that individual plants experience in situ. This mismatch is particularly pronounced in forest ecosystems, where canopy structure modulates the microclimate, resulting in understory conditions that can diverge substantially from regional climate averages. To address the limitations of coarse-grained climate data in explaining biodiversity patterns and community assembly we present a pipeline that leverages the mechanistic microclimate model microclimf. This model downscales hourly climate data by accounting for topography, ground conditions, and biotic factors, such as seasonal changes in leaf area index (LAI) in deciduous forests, to predict subdaily microclimate temperatures.
However, because the model relies on remotely sensed vegetation data such as LAI or tree height, its application is limited when working with vegetation data collected prior to the availability of remote-sensing products. Our approach addresses this limitation by defining forest types based on tree species' functional traits to estimate their climate-buffering capacity throughout the year, and by incorporating commonly assessed vegetation sampling data such as tree height and canopy cover. This enables future research to more effectively link plant biodiversity patterns with microclimatic conditions across broad spatial and temporal scales, thereby improving our understanding of baseline diversity and enhancing predictions of biodiversity change under future climate scenarios.
| Status Group | Doctoral Researcher |
|---|---|
| Poster Presentation Option | No, I prefer to present only as a talk. |
