Demographic Range Modeling

Climate has long been identified as the major determinant of species’ geographic distributions, and from climate-only (“climate-envelope”) models, it is estimated that ~15-35% of species are “committed to extinction” by climate change. Leveraging forest inventory data, we’ve been tackling the question of how tree species’ distributions, and the forest biome as a whole, will shift spatially with climate change.

Using demographi models (integral projection models) applied at the scale of a species’ geographic distribution, we evaluated what factors (climate, interspecific interactions, disturbances) control the distribution. We concluded that species’ distributions are climate-driven, but characterized by complex dynamics involving feedbacks and cross-scale interactions, leading to complex dynamics not predictable from a climate-only perspective. In other words, our work suggests that static, climate envelope models are inadequate to predict species' response to changing climate.