Climate change impacts on trees reproduction and forecasts of forest recruitment change

Introduction

The capacity of future forests to support biodiversity and deliver ecosystem services will depend on reproductive capacities that keep pace with 21st century climate change. The European continent is warming and drying out fast, and similar changes are happening worldwide.

Biodiversity Trends

The decade-scale trends in biodiversity will be governed by tree fecundity—the capacity of trees to produce seed and to disperse it to the habitats where populations can survive in the future. From the boreal to the tropical forests, including the majority of European tree species, reproduction happens through synchronized, quasi-periodic, non-stationary variation in fruit production, termed masting or mast seeding.

Understanding Masting

Despite the crucial role of mast seeding in plant regeneration and wider ecological processes, our understanding of this process is rudimentary. Poor understanding of the mechanisms that govern it presents challenges for anticipating alterations in forest reproduction and function.

Predictive Models

Reliable predictive models are consequently not available, and the unpredictable recruitment of trees has become a key obstacle to understanding forest change. Recruitment, including reproduction and dispersal, is the most undeveloped demographic process in Earth system models.

Project Goals

This work will transform our understanding of the mechanisms governing tree reproduction and deliver tools for predicting forest reproduction trajectories under climate change. The main outcomes will be:

1. The first experimental description of how masting emerges at a proximal level.
2. An understanding of how this is conserved among species.
3. The first explicit test of how variation in masting patterns matters for forest regeneration trajectories.

Conservation Implications

Together with the analysis of global reproductive patterns, our work will deliver a step-change in identifying species and regions of special conservation care.