Forest Biodiversity Responses to Changing Climate Across the Americas: Synthesis of Long-term Ecological Data

 

a series of workshops in 2024 and 2025 by

David Luther (GMU) Lynn Christenson (Vasser) & Nina Laney (USFS)

Funded by NSF DEB #  2227314 

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Workshop Summary

Forest communities are changing rapidly, but it has been difficult to determine if those changes are attributable to just climate or if other changes, like habitat degradation or pollution are also partially responsible.  Many studies follow forest community change over short periods of time, making it difficult to identify drivers of change. Long-term research, often spanning decades of data collection at specific locations, such as Long-term Ecological Research sites, collect local information about different species, individuals and environmental conditions, providing unique opportunities to uncover both patterns and drivers of change. These workshops brought together ecologists, data managers, and statisticians to harmonize data from long-term research sites in forest ecosystems, including Long-term Ecological Research sites (in the US and abroad), National Ecological Observation Network, and National Park Service biodiversity monitoring sites to assess the long-term effects of climate change on forest communities across the Americas that have not been impacted by habitat loss. Results will lead to a strong research network of ecologists that study a broad range of taxonomic groups focused on understanding the long-term changes in forest ecosystems both at local and continental scales.

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The explicitly inter-disciplinary nature of the workshop will foster linkages and collaborations that will result in alleviating field sampling and statistical barriers for scaling the information from individual long-term ecological research sites to the macrosystem scale. Such barriers still limit researchers from broadening the scale and scope of their research. The two-day workshop will harmonize data sets from different locations as well as spatial and temporal scales to investigate the effects of climate change on biodiversity in forest ecosystems across the Americas. The resulting synthesis research paper will encompass how forest biodiversity, in locations not affected by habitat destruction, across the Americas has changed over the past ~ 40 years and the role of climate in driving those changes. This workshop will bring together experts in the fields of ecology, data management, statistics and climate change with the overall goal of integrating large data sets that represent both spatial and temporal scales of biodiversity across the Americas under changing climate conditions of the past 40-50 years.  The data sets generated during the workshop will be made available through the Environmental Data Initiative, including approaches used to harmonize data. Finally, this workshop provides ongoing professional development for all participants, engaging each in unfamiliar techniques that will support their own future work as well as creating a new network of collaborators.

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Contact David Luther dluther@gmu.edu for inquiries.

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PRELIMINARY RESULTS

Over the past 20 years bird community data

from intact forests show the following trends

 

Temperate Broadleaf Forests show stable or

slightly homogenizing community structure

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Tropical Forests show increased nestedness

and reduced species turnover, but high 

individual site level variation

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Temperate Conifer Forests show increasing

evenness and nestedness over time.

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NEXT STEPS

Align climate, topography, landuse history and

landscape metrics with species diversity at

each site to investigate their influence on

community composition

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