Quaternary climate change explains global patterns of tree beta-diversity
- Find this author on Google Scholar
- Find this author on PubMed
- Search for this author on this site
- ORCID record for Wu-Bing Xu
- For correspondence: wbingxu@gmail.com wubingxu@bio.au.dk wbingxu@gmail.com wenyong.guo@bio.au.dk guowyhgy@gmail.com svenning@bio.au.dk alejandro.ordonez@bio.au.dk wolf.eiserhardt@bio.au.dk
- Find this author on Google Scholar
- Find this author on PubMed
- Search for this author on this site
- ORCID record for Jens-Christian Svenning
- For correspondence: wubingxu@bio.au.dk wbingxu@gmail.com wenyong.guo@bio.au.dk guowyhgy@gmail.com svenning@bio.au.dk alejandro.ordonez@bio.au.dk wolf.eiserhardt@bio.au.dk

Abstract
Both historical and contemporary environmental conditions determine present biodiversity patterns, but their relative importance is not well understood. One way to disentangle their relative effects is to assess how different dimensions of beta-diversity relate to past climatic changes, i.e., taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional compositional dissimilarity, and their components generated by replacement of species, lineages and traits (turnover) and richness changes (nestedness). Here, we quantify global patterns of each of these aspects of beta-diversity among neighboring sites for angiosperm trees using the most extensive global database of tree species-distributions (43,635 species). We found that temperature change since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was the major influence on both turnover and nestedness components of beta-diversity, with a negative correlation to turnover and a positive correlation to nestedness. Moreover, phylogenetic and functional nestedness was higher than expected from taxonomic beta-diversity in regions that experienced large temperature changes since the LGM. This pattern reflects relatively greater losses of phylogenetic and functional diversity in species-poor assemblages, possibly caused by phylogenetically and functionally selective species extinction and recolonization during glacial-interglacial oscillations. Our results send a strong warning that rapid anthropogenic climate change is likely to result in a long-lasting phylogenetic and functional compositional simplification, potentially impairing forest ecosystem functioning.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Subject Area
- Biochemistry (10313)
- Bioengineering (7642)
- Bioinformatics (26248)
- Biophysics (13481)
- Cancer Biology (10650)
- Cell Biology (15366)
- Clinical Trials (138)
- Developmental Biology (8468)
- Ecology (12778)
- Epidemiology (2067)
- Evolutionary Biology (16795)
- Genetics (11373)
- Genomics (15431)
- Immunology (10582)
- Microbiology (25088)
- Molecular Biology (10172)
- Neuroscience (54239)
- Paleontology (398)
- Pathology (1660)
- Pharmacology and Toxicology (2884)
- Physiology (4328)
- Plant Biology (9214)
- Synthetic Biology (2545)
- Systems Biology (6762)
- Zoology (1459)