A new study of 130 North American tree species concludes that expected climate change this century could shift their ranges northward by hundreds of kilometers and shrink the ranges by more than half.
The most detailed study to date of North American tree species, by Daniel McKenney and his colleagues at the Canadian Forest Service, was reported Monday in the December issue of BioScience, the monthly journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.
If the trees were assumed to respond to climate change by dispersing their progeny to more favorable locations, McKenney and his colleagues found, ranges of the studied species would move northward by some 700 kilometers and decrease in size by an average of 12 percent (with some increasing while others decreased).
If the species were assumed unable to disperse, the average expected range shift was 320 kilometers, and reductions of ranges could be as "drastic" as 58 percent.
The researchers believe that most species will probably fall somewhere between these two extremes of ability to disperse.
The study is based on an extensive data-gathering effort and thus more comprehensive than studies based on published range maps. It includes data from Canada as well as from the United States.
The researchers note that their study investigated only a small sample of the 700 or so tree species in North America, and that under climate change new species might colonize the southern part of the continent from tropical regions.
Source: Xinhua
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