Detecting recent broad-scale changes in forest biodiversity
PARTNERS: North Carolina State University (NCSU) Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station, USDA Forest Service Forest Health Monitoring Program
SUMMARY: Climate change and other threats are likely to alter the composition of forests as species die out in some areas and move into others, which could alter the ecological function of forest communities. To support forest management related to these climate change impacts, a cooperating scientist from North Carolina State University is working with Forest Service scientists to measure forest biodiversity changes in the eastern United States. A new approach known as phylogenetic community analysis makes measurement of the functional diversity of forest communities possible by calculating the cumulative evolutionary age of all the species in a community based on their position on a phylogenetic “tree of life” generated from gene sequencing studies and the fossil record.
This “evolutionary diversity” is arguably a more biologically meaningful measurement of biodiversity than traditional statistics such as species richness and abundance. Using repeated measurements on thousands of Forest Inventory and Analysis plots, results have detected recent broad-scale patterns of forest biodiversity change, including increasing seedling diversity in the South and decreasing seedling diversity in the North. These new indicators of forest biodiversity change will allow for the robust and rapid monitoring of climate change effects on biodiversity across broad regions.
EFETAC'S ROLE: This project is supported by EFETAC funding.
STATUS: Ongoing
PROGRESS: This project uses Forest Inventory and Analysis data at a variety of spatial scales to characterize forest tree phylogenetic diversity, a measure of community composition that incorporates evolutionary relationships among species. A journal manuscript is in press, as is a chapter in the Forest Health Monitoring National Technical Report. New work will investigate the use of phylogenetic diversity metrics to detect the impacts of forest threats on forest biodiversity and function.
This research has been described in a number of presentations and papers.
LINKS:
NCSU Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources
USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station
USDA Forest Service Forest Health Monitorig Program
CONTACT: Kevin Potter, NCSU Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, kevinpotter@fs.fed.us or (919) 549-4071
Updated January 2012
