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- Eiserhardt, W. L., et al.
(författare)
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A roadmap for global synthesis of the plant tree of life
- 2018
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Ingår i: American Journal of Botany. - : Wiley. - 0002-9122 .- 1537-2197. ; 105:3, s. 614-622
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Providing science and society with an integrated, up-to-date, high quality, open, reproducible and sustainable plant tree of life would be a huge service that is now coming within reach. However, synthesizing the growing body of DNA sequence data in the public domain and disseminating the trees to a diverse audience are often not straightforward due to numerous informatics barriers. While big synthetic plant phylogenies are being built, they remain static and become quickly outdated as new data are published and tree-building methods improve. Moreover, the body of existing phylogenetic evidence is hard to navigate and access for non-experts. We propose that our community of botanists, tree builders, and informaticians should converge on a modular framework for data integration and phylogenetic analysis, allowing easy collaboration, updating, data sourcing and flexible analyses. With support from major institutions, this pipeline should be re-run at regular intervals, storing trees and their metadata long-term. Providing the trees to a diverse global audience through user-friendly front ends and application development interfaces should also be a priority. Interactive interfaces could be used to solicit user feedback and thus improve data quality and to coordinate the generation of new data. We conclude by outlining a number of steps that we suggest the scientific community should take to achieve global phylogenetic synthesis.
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| 2. |
- Babst, F., et al.
(författare)
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When tree rings go global: Challenges and opportunities for retro- and prospective insight
- 2018
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Ingår i: Quaternary Science Reviews. - : Elsevier BV. - 0277-3791. ; 197, s. 1-20
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The demand for large-scale and long-term information on tree growth is increasing rapidly as environmental change research strives to quantify and forecast the impacts of continued warming on forest ecosystems. This demand, combined with the now quasi-global availability of tree-ring observations, has inspired researchers to compile large tree-ring networks to address continental or even global-scale research questions. However, these emergent spatial objectives contrast with paleo-oriented research ideas that have guided the development of many existing records. A series of challenges related to how, where, and when samples have been collected is complicating the transition of tree rings from a local to a global resource on the question of tree growth. Herein, we review possibilities to scale tree-ring data (A) from the sample to the whole tree, (B) from the tree to the site, and (C) from the site to larger spatial domains. Representative tree-ring sampling supported by creative statistical approaches is thereby key to robustly capture the heterogeneity of climate-growth responses across forested landscapes. We highlight the benefits of combining the temporal information embedded in tree rings with the spatial information offered by forest inventories and earth observations to quantify tree growth and its drivers. In addition, we show how the continued development of mechanistic tree-ring models can help address some of the non-linearities and feedbacks that complicate making inference from tree-ring data. By embracing scaling issues, the discipline of dendrochronology will greatly increase its contributions to assessing climate impacts on forests and support the development of adaptation strategies. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd
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| 3. |
- Björkman, Anne, 1981, et al.
(författare)
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Plant functional trait change across a warming tundra biome
- 2018
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Ingår i: Nature. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0028-0836 .- 1476-4687. ; 562:7725, s. 57-62
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The tundra is warming more rapidly than any other biome on Earth, and the potential ramifications are far-reaching because of global feedback effects between vegetation and climate. A better understanding of how environmental factors shape plant structure and function is crucial for predicting the consequences of environmental change for ecosystem functioning. Here we explore the biome-wide relationships between temperature, moisture and seven key plant functional traits both across space and over three decades of warming at 117 tundra locations. Spatial temperature–trait relationships were generally strong but soil moisture had a marked influence on the strength and direction of these relationships, highlighting the potentially important influence of changes in water availability on future trait shifts in tundra plant communities. Community height increased with warming across all sites over the past three decades, but other traits lagged far behind predicted rates of change. Our findings highlight the challenge of using space-for-time substitution to predict the functional consequences of future warming and suggest that functions that are tied closely to plant height will experience the most rapid change. They also reveal the strength with which environmental factors shape biotic communities at the coldest extremes of the planet and will help to improve projections of functional changes in tundra ecosystems with climate warming.
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