Influence of climate, soil, and land cover on plant species distribution in the European Alps

作者：Yohann Chauvier, Wilfried Thuiller, Philipp Brun, Sébastien Lavergne, Patrice Descombes, Dirk Nikolaus Karger, Julien Renaud, Niklaus E. Zimmermann · 发表于：Ecological Monographs · 年份：2020 · DOI：10.1002/ecm.1433 · 被引用次数：133 · 研究领域：Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Species Distribution and Climate Change、Forest ecology and management

Abstract Although the importance of edaphic factors and habitat structure for plant growth and survival is known, both are often neglected in favor of climatic drivers when investigating the spatial patterns of plant species and diversity. Yet, especially in mountain ecosystems with complex topography, missing edaphic and habitat components may be detrimental for a sound understanding of biodiversity distribution. Here, we compare the relative importance of climate, soil and land cover variables when predicting the distributions of 2,616 vascular plant species in the European Alps, representing approximately two‐thirds of all European flora. Using presence‐only data, we built point‐process models (PPMs) to relate species observations to different combinations of covariates. We evaluated the PPMs through block cross‐validations and assessed the independent contributions of climate, soil, and land cover covariates to predict plant species distributions using an innovative predictive partitioning approach. We found climate to be the most influential driver of spatial patterns in plant species with a relative influence of ~58.5% across all species, with decreasing importance from low to high elevations. Soil (~20.1%) and land cover (~21.4%), overall, were less influential than climate, but increased in importance along the elevation gradient. Furthermore, land cover showed strong local effects in lowlands, while the contribution of soil stabilized at mid‐elevations. The decreasin...