. Monthly microclimate models in a managed boreal forest landscape. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, Elsevier Masson, 2018, 250-251, pp.147 -158. 10.1016/j.agrformet.2017 A B S T R A C TThe majority of microclimate studies have been done in topographically complex landscapes to quantify and predict how near-ground temperatures vary as a function of terrain properties. However, in forests understory temperatures can be strongly influenced also by vegetation. We quantified the relative influence of vegetation features and physiography (topography and moisture-related variables) on understory temperatures in managed boreal forests in central Sweden. We used a multivariate regression approach to relate near-ground temperature of 203 loggers over the snow-free seasons in an area of ∼16,000 km 2 to remotely sensed and on-site measured variables of forest structure and physiography. We produced climate grids of monthly minimum and maximum temperatures at 25 m resolution by using only remotely sensed and mapped predictors. The quality and predictions of the models containing only remotely sensed predictors (MAP models) were compared with the models containing also on-site measured predictors (OS models). Our data suggest that during the warm season, where landscape microclimate variability is largest, canopy cover and basal area were the most important microclimatic drivers for both minimum and maximum temperatures, while physiographic drivers (mainly elevation) dominated maximum temperatures during autumn and early winter. The MAP models were able to reproduce findings from the OS models but tended to underestimate high and overestimate low temperatures. Including important microclimatic drivers, particularly soil moisture, that are yet lacking in a mapped form should improve the microclimate maps. Because of the dynamic nature of managed forests, continuous updates of mapped forest structure parameters are needed to accurately predict temperatures. Our results suggest that forest management (e.g. stand size, structure and composition) and conservation may play a key role in amplifying or impeding the effects of climate-forcing factors on near-ground temperature and may locally modify the impact of global warming.

The inclusion of environmental variation in studies of recruitment is a prerequisite for realistic predictions of the responses of vegetation to a changing environment. We investigated how seedling recruitment is affected by seed availability and microsite quality along a steep environmental gradient in dry tundra. A survey of natural seed rain and seedling density in vegetation was combined with observations of the establishment of 14 species after sowing into intact or disturbed vegetation. Although seed rain density was closely correlated with natural seedling establishment, the experimental seed addition showed that the microsite environment was even more important. For all species, seedling emergence peaked at the productive end of the gradient, irrespective of the adult niches realized. Disturbance promoted recruitment at all positions along the environmental gradient, not just at high productivity. Early seedling emergence constituted the main temporal bottleneck in recruitment for all species. Surprisingly, winter mortality was highest at what appeared to be the most benign end of the gradient. The results highlight that seedling recruitment patterns are largely determined by the earliest stages in seedling emergence, which again are closely linked to microsite quality. A fuller understanding of microsite effects on recruitment with implications for plant community assembly and vegetation change is provided.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00442-010-1878-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Soil seed banks offer plants the possibility to disperse through time. This has implications for population and community dynamics, as recognised by ecological and evolutionary theory. In contrast, the conservation and restoration literature often find seed banks to be depauperate, weedy and without much conservation value or restoration potential. One explanation for these contrasting views might lie in a systematic bias in the sampling of seed banks versus established plant communities. We use the species-area relationship as a tool to assess and compare the per-area species richness and spatial structuring of the diversity of the established plant community versus soil seed banks. To allow this direct comparison we extensively survey the species-area relationship of the vegetation and underlying seed bank of a grassland community across twelve sites spanning regional bioclimatic gradients. We also compile a global dataset of established vegetation and seed banks from published sources. We find that seed banks have consistently higher intercepts and slopes of the relationship, and hence higher diversity at any given spatial scale, than the vegetation both in the field and literature study. This is consistent across habitat types, climate gradients, and biomes. Similarity indices are commonly used to compare vegetation and seed bank, and we find that sampling effort (% of the vegetation area sampled for seed bank) was the strongest predictor of vegetation-seed bank similarity for both the Sørensen (R 2  0.70) and the Raup-Crick (R 2  0.25) index. Our study suggests that the perception that seed banks are intrinsically less diverse than established plant communities has been based more on inadequate sampling than on biological reality. Across a range of ecosystems and climatic settings, we find high diversity in seed banks relative to the established community, suggesting potentially important roles of seed banks in population dynamics and diversity maintenance.

Large‐domain species distribution models (SDMs) fail to identify microrefugia, as they are based on climate estimates that are either too coarse or that ignore relevant topographic climate‐forcing factors. Climate station data are considered inadequate to produce such estimates, a viewpoint we challenge here. Using climate stations and topographic data, we developed three sets of large‐domain (450 000 km²), fine‐grain (50 m) temperature grids accounting for different levels of topographic complexity. Using these fine‐grain grids and the Worldclim data, we fitted SDMs for 78 alpine species over Sweden, and assessed over‐ versus underestimations of local extinction and area of microrefugia by comparing modelled distributions at species' rear edges. Accounting for well‐known topographic climate‐forcing factors improved our ability to model fine‐scale climate, despite using only climate station data. This approach captured the effect of cool air pooling, distance to sea, and relative humidity on local‐scale temperature, but the effect of solar radiation could not be accurately accounted for. Predicted extinction rate decreased with increasing spatial resolution of the climate models and with increasing number of topographic climate‐forcing factors accounted for. About half of the microrefugia detected in the most topographically complete models were not detected in the coarser SDMs and in the models calibrated from climate variables extracted from elevation only. Although major limitations remain, climate station data can potentially be used to produce fine‐grain topoclimate grids, opening up the opportunity to model local‐scale ecological processes over large domains. Accounting for the topographic complexity encountered within landscapes permits the detection of microrefugia that would otherwise remain undetected. Topographic heterogeneity is likely to have a massive impact on species persistence, and should be included in studies on the effects of climate change.

Climate is a crucial driver of the distributions and activity of multiple biotic and abiotic processes, and thus high‐quality and high–resolution climate data are often prerequisite in various environmental research. However, contemporary gridded climate products suffer critical problems mainly related to sub‐optimal pixel size and lack of local topography‐driven temperature heterogeneity. Here, by integrating meteorological station data, high‐quality terrain information and multivariate modelling, we aim to explicitly demonstrate this deficiency. Monthly average temperatures (1981–2010) from Finland, Sweden and Norway were modelled using generalized additive modelling under (1) a conventional (i.e. considering geographical location, elevation and water cover) and (2) a topoclimatic framework (i.e. also accounting for solar radiation and cold‐air pooling). The performance of the topoclimatic model was significantly higher than the conventional approach for most months, with bootstrapped mean R2 for the topoclimatic model varying from 0.88 (January) to 0.95 (October). The estimated effect of solar radiation was evident during summer, while cold air pooling was identified to improve local temperature estimates in winter. The topoclimatic modelling exposed a substantial temperature heterogeneity within coarser landscape units (>5 °C/1 km−2 in summer) thus unveiling a wide range of potential microclimatic conditions neglected by the conventional approach. Moreover, the topoclimatic model predictions revealed a pronounced asymmetry in average temperature conditions, causing isotherms during summer to differ several hundreds of metres in altitude between the equator and pole facing slopes. In contrast, cold‐air pooling in sheltered landscapes lowered the winter temperatures ca. 1.1 °C/100 m towards the local minimum altitude. Noteworthy, the analysis implies that conventional models produce biassed predictions of long‐term average temperature conditions, with errors likely to be high at sites associated with complex topography.

Microrefugia are sites that support populations of species when their ranges contract during unfavorable climate episodes. Here, we review and discuss two aspects relevant for microrefugia. First, distributions of different species are influenced by different climatic variables. Second, climatic variables differ in the degree of local decoupling from the regional climate. Based on this, we suggest that only species limited by climatic conditions decoupled from the regional climate can benefit from microrefugia. We argue that this restriction has received little attention in spite of its importance for microrefugia as a mechanism for species resilience (the survival of unfavorable episodes and subsequent range expansion). Presence of microrefugia will depend on both the responses of individual species to local climatic variation and how climate-forcing factors shape the correlation between local and regional climate across space and time.

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Climate warming is likely to shift the range margins of species poleward, but fine‐scale temperature differences near the ground (microclimates) may modify these range shifts. For example, cold‐adapted species may survive in microrefugia when the climate gets warmer. However, it is still largely unknown to what extent cold microclimates govern the local persistence of populations at their warm range margin. We located 99 microrefugia, defined as sites with edge populations of 12 widespread boreal forest understory species (vascular plants, mosses, liverworts and lichens) in an area of ca. 24,000 km2 along the species' southern range margin in central Sweden. Within each population, a logger measured temperature eight times per day during one full year. Using univariate and multivariate analyses, we examined the differences of the populations' microclimates with the mean and range of microclimates in the landscape, and identified the typical climate, vegetation and topographic features of these habitats. Comparison sites were drawn from another logger data set (n = 110), and from high‐resolution microclimate maps. The microrefugia were mainly places characterized by lower summer and autumn maximum temperatures, late snow melt dates and high climate stability. Microrefugia also had higher forest basal area and lower solar radiation in spring and autumn than the landscape average. Although there were common trends across northern species in how microrefugia differed from the landscape average, there were also interspecific differences and some species contributed more than others to the overall results. Our findings provide biologically meaningful criteria to locate and spatially predict potential climate microrefugia in the boreal forest. This opens up the opportunity to protect valuable sites, and adapt forest management, for example, by keeping old‐growth forests at topographically shaded sites. These measures may help to mitigate the loss of genetic and species diversity caused by rear‐edge contractions in a warmer climate.