ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Climate change, tree demography, and thermophilization in western US forests.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Forest Densification and Pollution Rival Climate in Driving US Tree Demographic Change.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Thermophilization: Concepts, Methods, and Implications of Changes in Community Composition due to Global Warming.Global change biology · 2026Review
- Tree Regeneration After Unprecedented Forest Disturbances in Central Europe Is Robust but Maladapted to Future Climate Change.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Tree diversity is changing across tropical Andean and Amazonian forests in response to global change.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Rapid shifts in grassland communities driven by climate change.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Patterns of early post-disturbance reorganization in Central European forests.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Navigating ecological novelty towards planetary stewardship: challenges and opportunities in biodiversity dynamics in a transforming biosphere.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Climate change, tree demography, and thermophilization in western US forests.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Climate change is driving widespread changes in ecological communities. Warming temperatures often shift community composition toward more heat-tolerant taxa. The factors influencing the rate of this "thermophilization" process remain unclear. Using 10-y census data from an extensive forest plot network, we show that mature tree communities of the western United States have undergone thermophilization. The mean magnitude of climate warming over the 10-y study interval was 0.32 °C, whereas the mean magnitude of thermophilization was 0.039 °C. Differential tree mortality was the strongest demographic driver of thermophilization, rather than growth or recruitment. Thermophilization rates are associated with recent changes in temperature and hydrologic variables, as well as topography and disturbance, with insect damage showing the strongest standardized effect on thermophilization rates. On average, thermophilization occurred more rapidly on cool, north-facing hillslopes. Our results demonstrate that warming temperatures are outpacing the composition of western US forest tree communities, and that climate change may erode biodiversity patterns structured by topographic variation.
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Registered trials
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