CLIMATE CHANGE AND TREE SPECIES MIGRATION IMPACTS ON BOREAL AND TEMPERATE FOREST BIODIVERSITY

摘要

Anthropogenic activities such as deforestation, land use change and fossil fuel combustion are contributing towards global climatic change, including increases in average global temperatures (Houghton et al., 2001). Temperature change has been shown to be an important factor determining plant distribution and species migration patterns (Li et al., 2006) and will have profound impacts on the distribution, abundance, composition and function of forest ecosystems (Lucier et al., 2009) .These impacts arelikely to accelerate over the coming decades. Since forests cover about a third of the land surface of the Earth and home a large percentage of the biodiversity of terrestrial ecosystems (Fischlin et al., 2009), climate-change impacts will strongly influence long-term terrestrial ecosystem persistence and health (Lucier et al., 2009). It is suggested that the rate of extinction (and therefore the general impact on biodiversity, considered here in its most basic, sense of number of species) will be driven by the intensity and magnitude of temperature change as it affects species distribution and composition (Fischlin et al., 2009)