Life Sciences Commons^™

Plant Species’ Capacity For Range Shifts At The Habitat And Geographic Scales: A Trade-Off-Based Framework, Bailey H. Mcnichol, Sabrina E. Russo

School of Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

Climate change is causing rapid shifts in the abiotic and biotic environmental conditions experienced by plant populations, but we lack generalizable frameworks for predicting the consequences for species. These changes may cause individuals to become poorly matched to their environments, potentially inducing shifts in the distributions of populations and altering species’ habitat and geographic ranges. We present a trade-off-based framework for understanding and predicting whether plant species may undergo range shifts, based on ecological strategies defined by functional trait variation. We define a species’ capacity for undergoing range shifts as the product of its colonization ability and the ability to …