During his recent yearlong sabbatical, Daniel Laughlin led a study that found trees can sustain life in temperatures higher or lower than where they are currently growing.
Laughlin is lead author of a paper titled"Trees have overlapping potential niches that extend beyond their realized niches" that was published today in, a weekly peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that publishes important original scientific research.
The realized niche of a tree species is where you find it in nature, while the potential niche is where you could but don't because it was outcompeted by other tree species or it could not disperse there, Laughlin says. "When we walk in the woods, we see with our own eyes that tree species occur in distinct places. This is a core tenet of ecology," Laughlin says."However, where species are actually found in nature is a fraction of their potential distribution because competition with other species and dispersal limitation constrain where they actually occur."
The results also suggest that tree species will have different fates. Cold-tolerant trees, such as Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir, may not need to move to stay within their climatic tolerances. However, warm-tolerant species, such as live oak and longleaf pine, will need to migrate. Coral species exhibit different temperature tolerances. This is in part due to the composition of their microalgae symbionts. With a new method, researchers were able to predict how individual ...
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