ORCID Profile
0000-0002-8417-6112
Current Organisations
The University of Edinburgh
,
University of British Columbia
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Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-2006
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 19-06-2017
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 24-06-2020
DOI: 10.1111/GCB.15123
Abstract: Current analyses and predictions of spatially explicit patterns and processes in ecology most often rely on climate data interpolated from standardized weather stations. This interpolated climate data represents long‐term average thermal conditions at coarse spatial resolutions only. Hence, many climate‐forcing factors that operate at fine spatiotemporal resolutions are overlooked. This is particularly important in relation to effects of observation height (e.g. vegetation, snow and soil characteristics) and in habitats varying in their exposure to radiation, moisture and wind (e.g. topography, radiative forcing or cold‐air pooling). Since organisms living close to the ground relate more strongly to these microclimatic conditions than to free‐air temperatures, microclimatic ground and near‐surface data are needed to provide realistic forecasts of the fate of such organisms under anthropogenic climate change, as well as of the functioning of the ecosystems they live in. To fill this critical gap, we highlight a call for temperature time series submissions to SoilTemp, a geospatial database initiative compiling soil and near‐surface temperature data from all over the world. Currently, this database contains time series from 7,538 temperature sensors from 51 countries across all key biomes. The database will pave the way toward an improved global understanding of microclimate and bridge the gap between the available climate data and the climate at fine spatiotemporal resolutions relevant to most organisms and ecosystem processes.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-07-2021
DOI: 10.1002/RSE2.228
Abstract: Non‐forest ecosystems, dominated by shrubs, grasses and herbaceous plants, provide ecosystem services including carbon sequestration and forage for grazing, and are highly sensitive to climatic changes. Yet these ecosystems are poorly represented in remotely sensed biomass products and are unders led by in situ monitoring. Current global change threats emphasize the need for new tools to capture biomass change in non‐forest ecosystems at appropriate scales. Here we developed and deployed a new protocol for photogrammetric height using unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV) images to test its capability for delivering standardized measurements of biomass across a globally distributed field experiment. We assessed whether canopy height inferred from UAV photogrammetry allows the prediction of aboveground biomass (AGB) across low‐stature plant species by conducting 38 photogrammetric surveys over 741 harvested plots to s le 50 species. We found mean canopy height was strongly predictive of AGB across species, with a median adjusted R 2 of 0.87 (ranging from 0.46 to 0.99) and median prediction error from leave‐one‐out cross‐validation of 3.9%. Biomass per‐unit‐of‐height was similar within but different among, plant functional types. We found that photogrammetric reconstructions of canopy height were sensitive to wind speed but not sun elevation during surveys. We demonstrated that our photogrammetric approach produced generalizable measurements across growth forms and environmental settings and yielded accuracies as good as those obtained from in situ approaches. We demonstrate that using a standardized approach for UAV photogrammetry can deliver accurate AGB estimates across a wide range of dynamic and heterogeneous ecosystems. Many academic and land management institutions have the technical capacity to deploy these approaches over extents of 1–10 ha −1 . Photogrammetric approaches could provide much‐needed information required to calibrate and validate the vegetation models and satellite‐derived biomass products that are essential to understand vulnerable and understudied non‐forested ecosystems around the globe.
Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Date: 19-06-2020
Abstract: Land-use change by humans, particularly forest loss, is influencing Earth's bio ersity through time. To assess the influence of forest loss on population and bio ersity change, Daskalova et al. integrated data from more than 6000 time series of species' abundance, richness, and composition in ecological assemblages around the world. Forest loss leads to both positive and negative responses of populations and bio ersity, and the temporal lags in population and bio ersity change after forest loss can extend up to half a century. Land-use change precipitates ergent population and bio ersity change. This analysis has consequences for projections of human impact, ongoing conservation, and assessments of bio ersity change. Science , this issue p. 1341
Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Date: 18-10-2019
Abstract: Bio ersity is undergoing rapid change driven by climate change and other human influences. Blowes et al. analyze the global patterns in temporal change in bio ersity using a large quantity of time-series data from different regions (see the Perspective by Eriksson and Hillebrand). Their findings reveal clear spatial patterns in richness and composition change, where marine taxa exhibit the highest rates of change. The marine tropics, in particular, emerge as hotspots of species richness losses. Given that human activities are affecting bio ersity in magnitudes and directions that differ across the planet, these findings will provide a much needed biogeographic understanding of bio ersity change that can help inform conservation prioritization. Science , this issue p. 339 see also p. 308
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 06-07-2015
DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE2697
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 08-04-2012
DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1465
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 26-09-2018
DOI: 10.1038/S41586-018-0563-7
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.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 03-12-2018
DOI: 10.1101/473645
Abstract: Global assessments have highlighted land-use change as a key driver of bio ersity change. However, we lack real-world global-scale estimates of how habitat transformations such as forest loss and gain are reshaping bio ersity over time. Here, we quantify the influence of 150 years of forest cover change on populations and ecological assemblages worldwide and across taxa by analyzing change in 6,667 time series. We found that forest loss simultaneously intensified ongoing increases and decreases in abundance, species richness and temporal species replacement (turnover) by up to 48%. Temporal lags in these responses extended up to 50 years and increased with species’ generation time. Our findings demonstrate that land-use change precipitates ergent population and bio ersity change, highlighting the complex biotic consequences of deforestation and afforestation. Declines in forest cover lify both gains and losses in population abundance and bio ersity over time.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 27-04-2022
DOI: 10.1038/S41467-020-15014-4
Abstract: The majority of variation in six traits critical to the growth, survival and reproduction of plant species is thought to be organised along just two dimensions, corresponding to strategies of plant size and resource acquisition. However, it is unknown whether global plant trait relationships extend to climatic extremes, and if these interspecific relationships are confounded by trait variation within species. We test whether trait relationships extend to the cold extremes of life on Earth using the largest database of tundra plant traits yet compiled. We show that tundra plants demonstrate remarkably similar resource economic traits, but not size traits, compared to global distributions, and exhibit the same two dimensions of trait variation. Three quarters of trait variation occurs among species, mirroring global estimates of interspecific trait variation. Plant trait relationships are thus generalizable to the edge of global trait-space, informing prediction of plant community change in a warming world.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 28-06-2023
DOI: 10.1038/S41467-023-39573-4
Abstract: Climate change is leading to species redistributions. In the tundra biome, shrubs are generally expanding, but not all tundra shrub species will benefit from warming. Winner and loser species, and the characteristics that may determine success or failure, have not yet been fully identified. Here, we investigate whether past abundance changes, current range sizes and projected range shifts derived from species distribution models are related to plant trait values and intraspecific trait variation. We combined 17,921 trait records with observed past and modelled future distributions from 62 tundra shrub species across three continents. We found that species with greater variation in seed mass and specific leaf area had larger projected range shifts, and projected winner species had greater seed mass values. However, trait values and variation were not consistently related to current and projected ranges, nor to past abundance change. Overall, our findings indicate that abundance change and range shifts will not lead to directional modifications in shrub trait composition, since winner and loser species share relatively similar trait spaces.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-01-2017
DOI: 10.1002/ECY.1660
Abstract: We present new data and analyses revealing fundamental flaws in a critique of two recent meta-analyses of local-scale temporal bio ersity change. First, the conclusion that short-term time series lead to biased estimates of long-term change was based on two errors in the simulations used to support it. Second, the conclusion of negative relationships between temporal bio ersity change and study duration was entirely dependent on unrealistic model assumptions, the use of a subset of data, and inclusion of one outlier data point in one study. Third, the finding of a decline in local bio ersity, after eliminating post-disturbance studies, is not robust to alternative analyses on the original data set, and is absent in a larger, updated data set. Finally, the undebatable point, noted in both original papers, that studies in the ecological literature are geographically biased, was used to cast doubt on the conclusion that, outside of areas converted to croplands or asphalt, the distribution of bio ersity trends is centered approximately on zero. Future studies may modify conclusions, but at present, alternative conclusions based on the geographic-bias argument rely on speculation. In sum, the critique raises points of uncertainty typical of all ecological studies, but does not provide an evidence-based alternative interpretation.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-02-2022
DOI: 10.1111/GCB.16060
Abstract: Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we provide global maps of soil temperature and bioclimatic variables at a 1-km
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-09-2013
DOI: 10.1002/ECE3.710
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 16-11-2018
DOI: 10.1111/GEB.12783
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 24-08-2011
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 25-09-2017
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 24-08-2011
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 22-10-2018
DOI: 10.1111/GEB.12821
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 10-12-2018
DOI: 10.1038/S41559-018-0745-6
Abstract: Advancing phenology is one of the most visible effects of climate change on plant communities, and has been especially pronounced in temperature-limited tundra ecosystems. However, phenological responses have been shown to differ greatly between species, with some species shifting phenology more than others. We analysed a database of 42,689 tundra plant phenological observations to show that warmer temperatures are leading to a contraction of community-level flowering seasons in tundra ecosystems due to a greater advancement in the flowering times of late-flowering species than early-flowering species. Shorter flowering seasons with a changing climate have the potential to alter trophic interactions in tundra ecosystems. Interestingly, these findings differ from those of warmer ecosystems, where early-flowering species have been found to be more sensitive to temperature change, suggesting that community-level phenological responses to warming can vary greatly between biomes.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2012
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 17-07-2020
DOI: 10.1101/2020.07.16.206011
Abstract: Non-forest ecosystems, dominated by shrubs, grasses and herbaceous plants, provide ecosystem services including carbon sequestration and forage for grazing, yet are highly sensitive to climatic changes. Yet these ecosystems are poorly represented in remotely-sensed biomass products and are unders led by in-situ monitoring. Current global change threats emphasise the need for new tools to capture biomass change in non-forest ecosystems at appropriate scales. Here we assess whether canopy height inferred from drone photogrammetry allows the estimation of aboveground biomass (AGB) across low-stature plant species s led through a global site network. We found mean canopy height is strongly predictive of AGB across species, demonstrating standardised photogrammetric approaches are generalisable across growth forms and environmental settings. Biomass per-unit-of-height was similar within , but different among , plant functional types. We find drone-based photogrammetry allows for monitoring of AGB across large spatial extents and can advance understanding of understudied and vulnerable non-forested ecosystems across the globe.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 31-12-2019
DOI: 10.1111/GCB.14904
Abstract: Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to bio ersity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait‐based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits—almost complete coverage for ‘plant growth form’. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait–environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on in idual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives.
Publisher: IOP Publishing
Date: 12-2011
DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/045509
Abstract: Recent research using repeat photography, long-term ecological monitoring and dendrochronology has documented shrub expansion in arctic, high-latitude and alpine tundra ecosystems. Here, we (1) synthesize these findings, (2) present a conceptual framework that identifies mechanisms and constraints on shrub increase, (3) explore causes, feedbacks and implications of the increased shrub cover in tundra ecosystems, and (4) address potential lines of investigation for future research. Satellite observations from around the circumpolar Arctic, showing increased productivity, measured as changes in ‘greenness’, have coincided with a general rise in high-latitude air temperatures and have been partly attributed to increases in shrub cover. Studies indicate that warming temperatures, changes in snow cover, altered disturbance regimes as a result of permafrost thaw, tundra fires, and anthropogenic activities or changes in herbivory intensity are all contributing to observed changes in shrub abundance. A large-scale increase in shrub cover will change the structure of tundra ecosystems and alter energy fluxes, regional climate, soil–atmosphere exchange of water, carbon and nutrients, and ecological interactions between species. In order to project future rates of shrub expansion and understand the feedbacks to ecosystem and climate processes, future research should investigate the species or trait-specific responses of shrubs to climate change including: (1) the temperature sensitivity of shrub growth, (2) factors controlling the recruitment of new in iduals, and (3) the relative influence of the positive and negative feedbacks involved in shrub expansion.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-2018
DOI: 10.1111/GEB.12729
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-2012
DOI: 10.3732/AJB.1200107
Abstract: The development of biased sex ratios in dioecious plant species has been ascribed to either (1) factors influencing differential adult mortality of male and female plants or (2) factors acting at an early life stage that determine seed sex ratio or seedling survival. To discriminate between these two competing hypotheses, we surveyed sex and age of 379 in iduals from five species of the genus Salix across 11 alpine valleys in the southwest Yukon. We observed uniformly female-biased sex ratios of approximately 2:1 across all adult age cohorts and patch sizes of the five willow species. No spatial variation in sex ratio occurred that could be associated with site-specific characteristics such as elevation or aspect. Our results indicate that the female-biased sex ratios in the alpine willow species investigated in this study are not a consequence of ecological processes acting on established adult plants. The sex ratio is instead determined at an early life stage by a mechanism that remains unknown.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 05-12-2011
DOI: 10.1111/J.1461-0248.2011.01716.X
Abstract: Understanding the sensitivity of tundra vegetation to climate warming is critical to forecasting future bio ersity and vegetation feedbacks to climate. In situ warming experiments accelerate climate change on a small scale to forecast responses of local plant communities. Limitations of this approach include the apparent site-specificity of results and uncertainty about the power of short-term studies to anticipate longer term change. We address these issues with a synthesis of 61 experimental warming studies, of up to 20 years duration, in tundra sites worldwide. The response of plant groups to warming often differed with ambient summer temperature, soil moisture and experimental duration. Shrubs increased with warming only where ambient temperature was high, whereas graminoids increased primarily in the coldest study sites. Linear increases in effect size over time were frequently observed. There was little indication of saturating or accelerating effects, as would be predicted if negative or positive vegetation feedbacks were common. These results indicate that tundra vegetation exhibits strong regional variation in response to warming, and that in vulnerable regions, cumulative effects of long-term warming on tundra vegetation - and associated ecosystem consequences - have the potential to be much greater than we have observed to date.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Isla Myers-Smith.