Cool topoclimates promote cold-adapted plant diversity in temperate mountain forests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Climate strongly influences the composition and diversity of forest plant communities. Recent studies have highlighted the role of tree canopies in shaping understory thermal conditions at small spatial scales (i.e. microclimate), especially in lowland forests. In mountain forests, however, the influence of topography in environmental conditions (i.e., topoclimate) is ought to also influence plants’ perceived temperature. Understanding how topography and canopies interactively affect understory temperature is key to identifying stable refugia that could shelter cold-adapted forest specialist plants under climate change. Here we report on growing season understory temperatures using 48 loggers in contrasting topographic features and canopy of a mid-range mountain valley spanning from 475 m a.s.l. to 1203 m a.s.l. in the Vosges Mountains (NE France). We disentangle the relative importance and the effects of topography vs. canopy in determining local temperatures. We then evaluate how topography and canopy-induced variation in temperature drive plant community composition and richness in 306 floristic surveys across the studied mountain valley. Our results show that topography outweighed canopy cover in explaining growing season understory temperatures. Regardless of canopy, the daily mean temperature of the growing season in south-facing ridges was 1.5 °C (CI: 0.62 – 2.38°C) warmer than shaded valley bottoms, while dense canopies cooled temperatures by 0.5 °C (CI: 0.02 – 0.98 °C) compared to less dense canopies. Topoclimate explained community composition as much as elevation and was the only significant predictor of species richness. Cold topoclimates harbored 30% more species than the average species richness across our plots. This increase in species richness was explained by an increase of cold-adapted species, both forest specialist and generalist species. Our findings highlight a stronger role of topography compared to canopy cover on community composition in mountain forests via topoclimatic cooling of north-facing slopes and valley bottoms. The importance of topographic features to explain temperature cooling and diversity underpins their role as present and likely future microrefugia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".