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Enhanced habitat loss of the Himalayan endemic flora driven by warming-forced upslope tree expansion

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 6, pages 890–899 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

High-elevation trees cannot always reach the thermal treeline, the potential upper range limit set by growing-season temperature. But delineation of the realized upper range limit of trees and quantification of the drivers, which lead to trees being absent from the treeline, is lacking. Here, we used 30 m resolution satellite tree-cover data, validated by more than 0.7 million visual interpretations from Google Earth images, to map the realized range limit of trees along the Himalaya which harbours one of the world’s richest alpine endemic flora. The realized range limit of trees is ~800 m higher in the eastern Himalaya than in the western and central Himalaya. Trees had reached their thermal treeline positions in more than 80% of the cases over eastern Himalaya but are absent from the treeline position in western and central Himalaya, due to anthropogenic disturbance and/or premonsoon drought. By combining projections of the deviation of trees from the treeline position due to regional environmental stresses with warming-induced treeline shift, we predict that trees will migrate upslope by ~140 m by the end of the twenty-first century in the eastern Himalaya. This shift will cause the endemic flora to lose at least ~20% of its current habitats, highlighting the necessity to reassess the effectiveness of current conservation networks and policies over the Himalaya.

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Fig. 1: Calibration and validation of satellite tree-cover-based realized range limit of trees across the Himalaya.
Fig. 2: Elevational distribution of the realized range limit of trees across the Himalaya.
Fig. 3: Variables predicting spatial pattern of DTreeline.
Fig. 4: Projections of the upslope shift of upper range limit of trees and its impact on the habitat loss of the endemic flora at the end of this century.

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Data availability

All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in this paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Information. The spatial distribution of manually interpreted and Landsat tree-cover-derived realized range limit of trees can be accessed through https://globalmapping.users.earthengine.app/view/realized-upper-range-limit-position-over-himalaya.

Code availability

All computer codes used in this study can be provided by the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank C. Körner for his constructive suggestions and edits to the text. We also thank F. Zhuang and Y. Wang for helping with endemic species identification. This study was supported by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (2019QZKK0405), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41922004), the NSFC project Basic Science Centre for Tibetan Plateau Earth System (41988101-04), the Preliminary Research on Three Poles Environment and Climate Change (2019YFC1509103) and the Key Research and Development Programs for Global Change and Adaptation (2017YFA0603604). We also acknowledge the support of Kathmandu Center for Research and Education, Chinese Academy of Sciences—Tribhuvan University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Plateau Earth System and Resources Environment (TPESRE), Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Xiaoyi Wang, Tao Wang, Jinfeng Xu, Eryuan Liang & Shilong Piao

  2. School of Life Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China

    Jinfeng Xu

  3. Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Institute of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Zehao Shen & Shaopeng Wang

  4. CAS Key Laboratory of Tropical Forest Ecology, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mengla, China

    Yongping Yang

  5. Department of Biology and Graduate Degree Program in Ecology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Anping Chen

  6. Sino-French Institute for Earth System Science, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Shilong Piao

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Contributions

T.W. and Z.S. designed the research. T.W. and X.W. wrote the paper. X.W. and J.X. performed the data analysis. J.X. and X.W. manually interpreted realized upper range limit of trees using Google Earth images. Y.Y. led identification of alpine endemic species. A.C., S.W., E.L. and S.P. contributed to the interpretation of the results and to the text.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tao Wang.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Validation of satellite tree-cover-based realized range limit of trees against manual interpretation from Google Earth high-resolution images over the Himalaya.

(a) The elevational distribution of manually interpreted realized range limit of trees from Google Earth high-resolution images. The relationships of satellite tree-cover-based realized range limit of trees with manual interpretation in western (b), central (c) and eastern regions (d), with the 1:1 line (dashed) and the regression line (continuous). R2 and ME indicate the coefficient of determination and the mean error, respectively.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Linking ground temperature at 10 cm depth with the land surface skin temperature and air temperature at thermal treeline sites.

(a) The global distribution of thermal treeline sites with a record of the soil temperature at a depth of 10 cm. (b-c) The regression between growing-season land surface skin temperature (°C) (b), air temperature (°C) (c), and ground temperature (°C) across sites, with the grey shading indicates 95% confidence intervals. The land surface skin temperature at each site is taken from Collection 6 of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer at a spatial resolution of 1 km.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Spatial distribution of derivation of realized range limit of trees from treeline elevation (DTreeline) across the Himalayas.

The insects show the frequency distribution of DTreeline.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods 1–4, Discussion, Figs. 1–13, Tables 1–6 and references.

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Wang, X., Wang, T., Xu, J. et al. Enhanced habitat loss of the Himalayan endemic flora driven by warming-forced upslope tree expansion. Nat Ecol Evol 6, 890–899 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01774-3

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