The relative roles of environment and history as controls of tree species composition and richness in Europe

Aim This study investigates the determinants of European-scale patterns in tree species composition and richness, addressing the following questions: (1) What is the relative importance of environment and history? History refers to lasting effects of past large-scale events and time-dependent cumula...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Journal of biogeography 2005-06, Vol.32 (6), p.1019-1033
Main Authors:	Svenning, Jens-Christian, Skov, Flemming
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Animal and plant ecology Animal, plant and microbial ecology Biological and medical sciences Canonical ordination climate Climate models Conifers dispersal limitation diversity gradients Forest cover Forest ecology Forest soils Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology General aspects history Ordinations plant migration plant species distributions Plants Principal components analysis Rapoport's Rule, Range Relationships and Diversity Gradients Species species richness Synecology temperate trees Trees variance decomposition
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Summary:	Aim This study investigates the determinants of European-scale patterns in tree species composition and richness, addressing the following questions: (1) What is the relative importance of environment and history? History refers to lasting effects of past large-scale events and time-dependent cumulative effects of ongoing processes, notably dispersal limited range dynamics. (2) Among the environmental determinants, what is the relative importance of climate, soils, and forest cover? (3) Do the answers to questions 1 and 2 differ between conifers and Fagales, the two major monophyletic groups of European trees? Location The study area comprises most of Europe (34° N-72° N and 11° W-32° E). Methods Atlas data on native distributions of 54 large tree species at 50 x 50 km resolution were linked with climatic, edaphic, and forest cover maps in a geographical information system. Unconstrained (principal components analysis using Hellinger distance transformation and detrended correspondence analysis) and constrained ordinations (redundancy analysis using Hellinger distance transformation and canonical correspondence analysis) and multiple linear regressions were used to investigate the determinants of species composition and species richness, respectively. History is expected to leave its mark as broad spatial patterns and was represented by the nine spatial terms of a cubic trend surface polynomial. Results The main floristic pattern identified by all ordinations was a latitude-temperature gradient, while the lower axes corresponded mostly to spatial variables. Partitioning the floristic variation using constrained ordinations showed the mixed spatial-environmental and pure spatial fractions to be much greater than the pure environmental fraction. Biplots, forward variable selection, and partial analyses all suggested climatic variables as more important floristic determinants than forest cover or soil variables. Tree species richness peaked in the mountainous regions of East-Central and Southern Europe, except the Far West. Variation partitioning of species richness found the mixed spatial-environmental and pure spatial fractions to be much greater than the pure environmental fraction for all species combined and Fagales, but not for conifers. The scaled regression coefficients indicated climate as a stronger determinant of richness than soils or forest cover. While the dominant patterns were similar for conifers and Fagales, conifers exhibited less predictab
ISSN:	0305-0270 1365-2699