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Social and Behavioral Sciences
University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Plant Distribution Data Show Broader Climatic Limits Than Expert-Based Climatic Tolerance Estimates, Caroline A. Curtis, Bethany A. Bradley
Plant Distribution Data Show Broader Climatic Limits Than Expert-Based Climatic Tolerance Estimates, Caroline A. Curtis, Bethany A. Bradley
Environmental Conservation Faculty Publication Series
Background
Although increasingly sophisticated environmental measures are being applied to species distributions models, the focus remains on using climatic data to provide estimates of habitat suitability. Climatic tolerance estimates based on expert knowledge are available for a wide range of plants via the USDA PLANTS database. We aim to test how climatic tolerance inferred from plant distribution records relates to tolerance estimated by experts. Further, we use this information to identify circumstances when species distributions are more likely to approximate climatic tolerance.
Methods
We compiled expert knowledge estimates of minimum and maximum precipitation and minimum temperature tolerance for over 1800 …