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Extinction debt and colonization credit delay range shifts of eastern North American trees

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 1, Article number: 0182 (2017) Cite this article

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Abstract

Global climate change is already having an impact on species ranges. For species with slow demography and limited dispersal, such as trees, lags between climate change and distribution shifts are likely to increase in the future. Such lags can be of critical importance to management and biodiversity of forests, because they can result in ‘extinction debts’, where populations temporarily persist under unsuitable conditions, and ‘colonization credits’, where suitable locations are not occupied owing to slow demography and limited dispersal. Here we use a range dynamics model based on metapopulation theory to show that the distributions of 21 dominant trees in eastern North America are out of equilibrium with climate and demonstrate both extinction debt and colonization credit. Moreover, lags are more severe at northern range limits, suggesting that range contraction in response to warming temperatures will outpace expansion.

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Figure 1: Schematic demonstrating how metapopulation dynamics can lead to range limits.
Figure 2: Maps of projected species ranges with extinction debt and colonization credit for selected species.
Figure 3: The responsiveness of species ranges to changes in temperature.
Figure 4: Predicted recruitment and mortality rates in equilibrium ranges and in areas facing extinction debt.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding from NSERC strategic grant 430393-12, the European Research Council’s Seven Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013 grant agreement no. 281422 (TEEMBIO), and the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science. We are grateful for feedback from L. J. Pollock.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, UMR 5553, Laboratoire d'Écologie Alpine (LECA), Grenoble, F-38000, France

    Matthew V. Talluto & Wilfried Thuiller

  2. Department of Biosciences, Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus,, Denmark

    Isabelle Boulangeat

  3. Département de biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada

    Steve Vissault & Dominique Gravel

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  1. Matthew V. Talluto
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  2. Isabelle Boulangeat
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  4. Wilfried Thuiller
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  5. Dominique Gravel
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Contributions

M.V.T., D.G., S.V. and I.B. conceived the study, S.V. built the database and M.V.T. wrote the code for the model, MCMC samplers, and ran the analyses. All authors contributed to writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Matthew V. Talluto.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Supplementary Methods, Supplementary References, Supplementary Tables 1–3, Supplementary Figures 1–12. (PDF 15185 kb)

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Talluto, M., Boulangeat, I., Vissault, S. et al. Extinction debt and colonization credit delay range shifts of eastern North American trees. Nat Ecol Evol 1, 0182 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0182

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