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Grant support
Bavarian State Forest Authority (Project MARGINS); IGSSE_TUM (Water03-IDDEC); Comunidad de Madrid (Project BOSSANOVA), Grant/Award Number: S2013/MAE-2760; Postdoctoral Junior Leader Fellowship Programme from la Caixa Banking Foundation; Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Grant/Award Number: AGL 2014-61175-JIN, RyC-2014-15864; European Research Council, Grant/Award Number: 282250
Analysis of institutional authors
Dorado-Linan, IsabelAuthorGeographical adaptation prevails over species-specific determinism in trees' vulnerability to climate change at Mediterranean rear-edge forests
Publicated to:Global Change Biology. 25 (4): 1296-1314 - 2019-04-01 25(4), DOI: 10.1111/gcb.14544
Authors: Dorado-Linan, Isabel; Piovesan, Gianluca; Martinez-Sancho, Elisabet; Gea-Izquierdo, Guillermo; Zang, Christian; Canellas, Isabel; Castagneri, Daniele; Di Filippo, Alfredo; Gutierrez, Emilia; Ewald, Joerg; Fernandez-de-Una, Laura; Hornstein, Daniel; Jantsch, Matthias C.; Levanic, Tom; Mellert, Karl H.; Vacchiano, Giorgio; Zlatanov, Tzvetan; Menzel, Annette;
Affiliations
Abstract
Climate change may reduce forest growth and increase forest mortality, which is connected to high carbon costs through reductions in gross primary production and net ecosystem exchange. Yet, the spatiotemporal patterns of vulnerability to both short-term extreme events and gradual environmental changes are quite uncertain across the species' limits of tolerance to dryness. Such information is fundamental for defining ecologically relevant upper limits of species tolerance to drought and, hence, to predict the risk of increased forest mortality and shifts in species composition. We investigate here to what extent the impact of short- and long-term environmental changes determines vulnerability to climate change of three evergreen conifers (Scots pine, silver fir, Norway spruce) and two deciduous hardwoods (European beech, sessile oak) tree species at their southernmost limits of distribution in the Mediterranean Basin. Finally, we simulated future forest growth under RCP 2.6 and 8.5 emission scenarios using a multispecies generalized linear mixed model. Our analysis provides four key insights into the patterns of species' vulnerability to climate change. First, site climatic marginality was significantly linked to the growth trends: increasing growth was related to less climatically limited sites. Second, estimated species-specific vulnerability did not match their a priori rank in drought tolerance: Scots pine and beech seem to be the most vulnerable species among those studied despite their contrasting physiologies. Third, adaptation to site conditions prevails over species-specific determinism in forest response to climate change. And fourth, regional differences in forests vulnerability to climate change across the Mediterranean Basin are linked to the influence of summer atmospheric circulation patterns, which are not correctly represented in global climate models. Thus, projections of forest performance should reconsider the traditional classification of tree species in functional types and critically evaluate the fine-scale limitations of the climate data generated by global climate models.
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Quality index
Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel
The work has been published in the journal Global Change Biology due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency WoS (JCR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2019, it was in position 1/58, thus managing to position itself as a Q1 (Primer Cuartil), in the category Biodiversity Conservation. Notably, the journal is positioned above the 90th percentile.
From a relative perspective, and based on the normalized impact indicator calculated from World Citations provided by WoS (ESI, Clarivate), it yields a value for the citation normalization relative to the expected citation rate of: 1.45. This indicates that, compared to works in the same discipline and in the same year of publication, it ranks as a work cited above average. (source consulted: ESI Nov 14, 2024)
This information is reinforced by other indicators of the same type, which, although dynamic over time and dependent on the set of average global citations at the time of their calculation, consistently position the work at some point among the top 50% most cited in its field:
- Weighted Average of Normalized Impact by the Scopus agency: 3.44 (source consulted: FECYT Feb 2024)
Specifically, and according to different indexing agencies, this work has accumulated citations as of 2025-06-10, the following number of citations:
- WoS: 30
- Scopus: 64
- OpenCitations: 59
Impact and social visibility
Leadership analysis of institutional authors
This work has been carried out with international collaboration, specifically with researchers from: Bulgaria; France; Germany; Italy; Slovenia.
There is a significant leadership presence as some of the institution’s authors appear as the first or last signer, detailed as follows: First Author (DORADO LIÑAN, ISABEL) .