Ines Ibanez, Ph.D. - US grants

The global climate is undergoing changes in temperature and precipitation that are altering the abundance and distribution of species around the world. Species that are important from conservation, ecological, cultural, and economic perspectives may face decline and extinction in coming decades. Phenology, the timing of biological events, has emerged as a key indicator of species response to global warming and other aspects of climate change. Phenology includes the flowering and leafing out dates of plants, first arrival dates of birds, and other events throughout the year. The ability of scientists to predict how climate change will affect species and biological communities remains very limited, especially at the scale of countries and continents. Researchers in this project will study the year-round phenological trends since 1953 of numerous plant and animal species using data from 176 meteorological sites across Japan and South Korea. These records cover more species, a longer time period, and more sites than any comparable data set from the United States, and can be used to develop innovative methods of analysis that can be applied to species in the United States and elsewhere. At field sites in Japan, the researchers will examine ecological interactions, e.g., between plants and pollinators, to determine the potential for ecological mismatches among species with different responses to climate change. The U.S. researchers will train undergraduate and graduate students and will work with scientists from Japan, South Korea, China, and Europe, and the new U.S. National Phenological Network, thereby strengthening international connections among climate change researchers.

Many plant species are expected to shift their distributional ranges in response to global warming. The ecological and economic consequences of such shifts could be enormous and have serious implications for conservation of local biodiversity, for the economic value of local forests (e.g., economically relevant species might expand to new areas, or might experience a reduction on their current ranges), and also for preservation of relevant ecosystem functions (e.g., soil erosion prevention, replenishment of water table, carbon storage, and recreational activities).

It is important to consider that in addition to climate, many other factors will also shape the future composition of plant communities. For instance, plants can change the composition and abundance of soil organisms as well as the chemistry and structure of soil in ways that alter subsequent plant survival and growth. This process, referred to as plant-soil feedbacks will likely have a large impact on colonization success of migrant plant species as they may be released from their natural soil pathogens and/or deprived of key beneficial organisms that have become specialized on them in their native range. At this time, we have little or no information on how plant-soil interactions may influence plant species responses to climate change.

The overarching goal of this project is to conduct exploratory work that evaluates the role that plant-soil feedbacks may play on the migratory potential of dominant temperate tree species within the Great Lakes region. The combination of our ongoing field and proposed greenhouse studies will supply natural resources managers with realistic information on the species that will be able to establish or persist within the region under changing climate, helping to implement successful conservation and management programs.

Forests are the natural vegetation of about half of the U.S., and an important, current goal in ecology is to understand how changes in climate affect the structure and composition of forests. This project will approach this goal by focusing on a critical aspect of forest dynamics -- the recruitment of new trees into the forest as seedlings. To make the research most relevant to current conditions, the project will consider not just effects of climate, but how these may interact with effects from the fragmentation of forests and from the presence of introduced, invasive species. Research will combine field-based, observational, and experimental work with statistical analyses and modeling of the recruitment dynamics of several dominant tree species in the temperate deciduous forests of eastern North America, using sites from northern to southern Michigan. The results will lay a foundation for forecasting the future structure and composition of these forests.

Forests are a major natural resource for the nation. To manage them sustainably, policy makers and land users need to be able to plan for the likely complicating effects of climate change. The results from this project will give managers information about the potential of important forest trees to maintain stable populations under a range of management regimes. The project also includes an educational component. Methods and outcomes of the research will be disseminated in educational materials for university and K-12 students to foster scientific literacy about scientific models that describe and predict the impacts of climate change on forests.

As climate change alters temperature and precipitation, the distributions of plant species are expected to shift. However, the ability of plants to survive and grow in new areas will also depend upon how well they can resist the new sets of herbivores and pathogens they are likely to encounter. To investigate this in the forests of Michigan, a large experiment is underway in which 8,000 seedlings of 10 species of trees have been planted at 5 sites at different latitudes within and beyond the current ranges of the species. This project will enable researchers to identify the individual herbivores and pathogens that are attacking the trees at the different sites, and to tell which are responsible for the damage and disease observed. Results will help assess whether biotic interactions will prevent forests in this region of the U.S. from surviving climate change through species migration.

This project will train a Ph.D. student and an undergraduate student, and help continue educational outreach to 9th grade students. Results will also help the U.S. to anticipate and mitigate the negative effects of climate change on its natural resources.

The sustainability of North American forests depends on seed production by trees as well as seedlings that must establish for the next generation of trees. For most of North America, neither the amounts of seed that are produced, nor how much of that seed survives to become adult trees is known. Population spread beyond current frontiers will be governed by seed production of trees (fecundity), germination, and seedling survival—the capacity of trees to produce seed and disperse it to the habitats where populations can survive in the future. Planning for environmental change impacts requires this knowledge to anticipate tree species migrations and its impacts on the birds and mammals that depend on forests for habitat and food. Understanding these forest recruitment responses requires a methodological shift from the current method of monitoring of seeds, seedlings, and consumers on small plots to extensive sampling methods that can be implemented at biogeographic scales. This study combines continental scale tree fecundity estimates with a new generation of monitoring and synthesis methods for integrating tree fecundity, seedling success, and its impacts on animal consumers. This research will quantify current trends across the continent, the changes in forests that are happening now, and the habitat changes that are causing them. Development of a biogeographic network of tree fecundity and recruitment will provide the monitoring platform needed for science and management of future forests. Broader impacts will focus on stakeholder integration, including conservation and management planning, information transfer to stakeholders in federal and state agencies, and citizen science outreach. Products of the study will have immediate application to forest regeneration practices in the coming decades. Agency and NGO stakeholders will advise and disseminate products of the study. <br/><br/>New analytical tools will identify where tree recruitment is limited in North America, its rate of change, and what’s causing it. The project focuses on three recruitment stages, seed supply (seed mass per tree abundance), seedling establishment (seedlings per seed mass), and recruitment rate (advanced regeneration per seedling). Each recruitment stage will be linked to climate and habitat variables and to the vertebrate consumers of seeds, fruits, and nuts. Extensive gradient sampling (EGS) is a new approach to estimate the key demographic rates that are relevant at the scale of habitats or plant communities, while combining it with traditional data already available from the meter-scale intensive monitoring sampling (IMS). The project will include data collection based on this new approach, (EGS) of fecundity, tree recruitment, and vertebrates distributed across climate and habitats. Predictive vertebrate modeling (PVM) of activity based on camera traps (snapshot USA, NEON, and this study), live trapping (NEON sites) and bird point counts (BBS, NEON, and eBird) across North America will be conducted by the research team. By understanding tree recruitment and the vertebrates that depend on them, this study will i) identify the species that are limited by recruitment, including the habitats and stages where limitation occurs, ii) quantify the relationship with vertebrate activity, and iii) evaluate predictive distributions of change that account for climate-vertebrate interactions fitted to data. Quantifying tree fecundity and animal-consumer relationships at biogeographic scales will provide a foundation for the next generation of efforts to understand food web implications of environmental change.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.