Abstract
Climate change will lead to shifts in species distributions. This calls for a need to revise present strategies to preserve biodiversity. One example of a potential distribution shift is the northward migration of beech’s climate envelope (i.e. fundamental niche). This project will provide predictions for the effect of different national strategies for beech forest establishment north of its current main distribution on species’ ability to colonize these established stands. The predictions will be based on population simulations in assumed landscapes that represent beech establishment strategies differing in terms of establishment rate and pattern. We will start up by simulating fictitious species’ colonization. At a later stage, after having developed colonization models based on empirical data, we will simulate real species’ colonization of established stands. The colonisation model development includes testing a new method for the development of simulation models for metapopulations in changing landscapes. The method will not require data from repeated surveys, which are typically used for fitting metapopulation models. Finally, we will identify extinction thresholds for a red-listed moss as a function of dead wood quantity and turnover under different scenarios of climate change. Predictions of future species distributions based on simulations of spatial species dynamics in dynamic landscapes are very rare.
Sweden