Influence of climate, soil, and land cover on plant species distribution in the European Alps. Issue 2 (1st February 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Chauvier, Yohann; Thuiller, Wilfried; Brun, Philipp; Lavergne, Sébastien; Descombes, Patrice; Karger, Dirk N.; Renaud, Julien; Zimmermann, Niklaus E.
• Is Part Of: Ecological monographs. Volume 91:Issue 2(2021)
• Page Start: n/a
• Page End: n/a
• Publication Date: 2021-02-01
• Subjects: alpine ecosystems -- climate homogeneity -- ecological responses -- elevation gradient -- environmental drivers -- human influence -- mountain ecosystems -- point‐process modeling -- predictive partitioning -- soil heterogeneity -- species redistribution -- vascular vegetation; Ecology -- Periodicals; Ecology; Écologie; Electronic journals; Periodicals; Ressource Internet (Descripteur de forme); Périodique électronique (Descripteur de forme); 577
• DOI: 10.1002/ecm.1433
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0012-9615

Abstract

Abstract: Although the importance of edaphic factors and habitat structure for plant growth and survival is known, both are often neglected in favor of climatic drivers when investigating the spatial patterns of plant species and diversity. Yet, especially in mountain ecosystems with complex topography, missing edaphic and habitat components may be detrimental for a sound understanding of biodiversity distribution. Here, we compare the relative importance of climate, soil and land cover variables when predicting the distributions of 2, 616 vascular plant species in the European Alps, representing approximately two‐thirds of all European flora. Using presence‐only data, we built point‐process models (PPMs) to relate species observations to different combinations of covariates. We evaluated the PPMs through block cross‐validations and assessed the independent contributions of climate, soil, and land cover covariates to predict plant species distributions using an innovative predictive partitioning approach. We found climate to be the most influential driver of spatial patterns in plant species with a relative influence of ~58.5% across all species, with decreasing importance from low to high elevations. Soil (~20.1%) and land cover (~21.4%), overall, were less influential than climate, but increased in importance along the elevation gradient. Furthermore, land cover showed strong local effects in lowlands, while the contribution of soil stabilized at mid‐elevations. The decreasing influence of climate with elevation is explained by increasing endemism, and the fact that climate becomes more homogeneous as habitat diversity declines at higher altitudes. In contrast, soil predictors were found to follow the opposite trend. Additionally, at low elevations, human‐mediated land cover effects appear to reduce the importance of climate predictors. We conclude that soil and land cover are, like climate, principal drivers of plant species distribution in the European Alps. While disentangling their effects remains a challenge, future studies can benefit markedly by including soil and land cover effects when predicting species distributions.