ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2012
A demographic approach to study effects of climate change in desert plants.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spatiotemporal variation in top-kill agents relative to ontogenetic resprouting strategies in African savannas.Bioscience · 2026Article
- Assessment of the Status ofPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Population Exposure Changes to Mean and Extreme Climate Events Over Pakistan and Associated Mechanisms.GeoHealth · 2023Article
- Long-term seed bank persistence in a stochastic desert environment.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Microhabitats associated with solar energy development alter demography of two desert annuals.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2021Article
- Is the Life History Flexibility of Cold Desert Annuals Broad Enough to Cope with Predicted Climate Change? The Case ofBiology · 2021Article
- Climate change effects on desert ecosystems: A case study on the keystone species of the Namib Desert Welwitschia mirabilis.PloS one · 2021Article
- Simulated Photovoltaic Solar Panels Alter the Seed Bank Survival of Two Desert Annual Plant Species.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Contrasting effects of climate change on seasonal survival of a hibernating mammal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Phylogenetic and functional distinctiveness explain alien plant population responses to competition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Population projections of an endangered cactus suggest little impact of climate change.Oecologia · 2020Article
- Shrubs indirectly increase desert seedbanks through facilitation of the plant community.PloS one · 2019Article
- Niches and climate-change refugia in hundreds of species from one of the most arid places on Earth.PeerJ · 2019Article
- Effects of removing woody cover on long-term population dynamics of a rare annual plant (Ecology and evolution · 2018Article
- Seasonal Growth ofPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2018Article
- Future global productivity will be affected by plant trait response to climate.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Low interannual precipitation has a greater negative effect than seedling herbivory on the population dynamics of a short-lived shrub,Ecology and evolution · 2018Article
- Predicting evolution in response to climate change: the example of sprouting probability in three dormancy-prone orchid species.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- Population-level genetic variation and climate change in a biodiversity hotspot.Annals of botany · 2017Review
- Fixed allocation patterns, rather than plasticity, benefit recruitment and recovery from drought in seedlings of a desert shrub.AoB PLANTS · 2016Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Desert species respond strongly to infrequent, intense pulses of precipitation. Consequently, indigenous flora has developed a rich repertoire of life-history strategies to deal with fluctuations in resource availability. Examinations of how future climate change will affect the biota often forecast negative impacts, but these-usually correlative-approaches overlook precipitation variation because they are based on averages. Here, we provide an overview of how variable precipitation affects perennial and annual desert plants, and then implement an innovative, mechanistic approach to examine the effects of precipitation on populations of two desert plant species. This approach couples robust climatic projections, including variable precipitation, with stochastic, stage-structured models constructed from long-term demographic datasets of the short-lived Cryptantha flava in the Colorado Plateau Desert (USA) and the annual Carrichtera annua in the Negev Desert (Israel). Our results highlight these populations' potential to buffer future stochastic precipitation. Population growth rates in both species increased under future conditions: wetter, longer growing seasons for Cryptantha and drier years for Carrichtera. We determined that such changes are primarily due to survival and size changes for Cryptantha and the role of seed bank for Carrichtera. Our work suggests that desert plants, and thus the resources they provide, might be more resilient to climate change than previously thought.
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