Calibrating vascular plant abundance for detecting future climate changes in Oregon and Washington, USA

Abstract

We propose using future vascular plant abundances as indicators of future climate in a way analogous to the reconstruction of past environments by many palaeoecologists. To begin monitoring future short-term climate changes in the forests of Oregon and Washington, USA, we developed a set of transfer functions for a present-day calibration set consisting of climate parameters estimated, and species abundances measured, at 107 USDA Forest Service FIA (Forest Inventory and Analysis) Phase 3 plots. The predictive abilities of our transfer functions are comparable to, or better than, those reported in the literature, probably due both data quality and statistical considerations. However, model overfitting as a result of spatial autocorrelation remains a possibility. Because the predicted climate values sometimes deviate substantially from the observed values for individual plots, our transfer functions are appropriate for monitoring climatic trends over the entire Pacific Northwest or large regions within it, not for assessing climate change at individual plots.

Citation

Brady,Timothy J.; Monleon, Vicente J.; Gray, Andrew N. 2010. Calibrating vascular plant abundance for detecting future climate changes in Oregon and Washington, USA. Ecological Indicators. 10: 657-667.