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Maximum air temperature controlled by landscape topography affects plant species composition in temperate forests

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Abstract

Context

Forest microclimates differ from regional macroclimates because forest canopies affect energy fluxes near the ground. However, little is known about the environmental drivers of understorey temperature heterogeneity and its effects on species assemblages, especially at landscape scales.

Objectives

We aimed to identify which temperature variables best explain the landscape-scale distribution of forest vegetation and to disentangle the effects of elevation, terrain attributes and canopy cover on understorey temperatures.

Methods

We measured growing season air temperature, canopy cover and plant community composition within 46 plots established across a 400-km2 area in Czech Republic. We linked growing season maximum, mean and minimum temperatures with elevation, canopy cover and topographic proxies for heat load, topographic position, soil moisture and cold air drainage, and created fine-scale topoclimatic maps of the region. We compared the biological relevance of in situ measured temperatures and temperatures derived from fine-scaled topoclimatic maps and global WorldClim 2 maps.

Results

Maximum temperature was the best predictor of understorey plant species composition. Landscape-scale variation in maximum temperature was jointly driven by elevation and terrain topography (\(R_{{{\text{adj}}.}}^{2}\) = 0.79) but not by canopy cover. Modelled maximum temperature derived from our topoclimatic maps explained significantly more variation in plant community composition than WorldClim 2 grids.

Conclusions

Terrain topography creates landscape-scale variation in maximum temperature, which in turn controls plant species assembly within the forest understorey. Maximum temperature is therefore an important but neglected microclimatic driver of species distribution across landscapes.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all our colleagues that helped us collect field data. We further thank all three reviewers and the editor for their helpful and constructive comments. This study was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (Project 17-13998S), the Grant Agency of Charles University (Project 359515) and the Czech Academy of Sciences (Project RVO 67985939).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Zámek 1, 252 43, Průhonice, Czech Republic

    Martin Macek, Martin Kopecký & Jan Wild

  2. Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Benátská 2, 128 01, Prague 2, Czech Republic

    Martin Macek

  3. Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Kamýcká 129, 165 21, Prague 6 - Suchdol, Czech Republic

    Martin Kopecký

  4. Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Kamýcká 129, 165 21, Prague 6 - Suchdol, Czech Republic

    Jan Wild

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Macek, M., Kopecký, M. & Wild, J. Maximum air temperature controlled by landscape topography affects plant species composition in temperate forests. Landscape Ecol 34, 2541–2556 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-019-00903-x

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