Timing and adaptability endanger forests
UMaine
scientists find that trees are out of equilibrium with climate, posing new
challenges in a warming world
Marcus Wolf
Forecasts predicting where plants
and animals will inhabit over time rely primarily on information about their
current climate associations, but that only plays a partial role.
Under climate change, there’s a
growing interest in assessing whether trees and other species can keep pace
with changing temperatures and rainfall, shifting where they are found, also
known as their ranges, to track their suitable climates.
To test this, a University of
Maine-led research team studied the current ranges of hundreds of North