FOREST RESPONSES TO CLIMATE CHANGE ALONG AN ANDES-TO-AMAZON ELEVATIONAL GRADIENT
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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- abstract
- A pressing question in current biology is how ecosystems in general, and species in particular, are responding to climate change in time and space. This dissertation responds to this question using an elevational gradient as a tool to understand the influence of temperature in biodiversity and ecosystem function. This approach has a long history in ecology and biogeography because these “natural laboratories” provide insights into how species and ecosystems respond to climate change. Particularly, I look at Amazonian and Andean forest response to climate gradients and changes in those gradients through time, understanding patterns and processes of tree species-specific functional traits (wood density), shifts in species composition towards taxa that have warmer mean ranges (thermophilization process) and changes in tree demography (rates of tree mortality and recruitment) in temporal- and spatial-scales. These studies are based on comprehensive long-term inventory forest data that includes 41 permanent plots along a 3500 m elevational gradient in Eastern Peru spanning 38 years.
- subject
- Carbon dynamics
- Climate change
- Forest dynamics
- Species composition
- Species migration
- Wood density
- contributor
- Silman, Miles R. (committee chair)
- Anderson, T. Michael (committee member)
- Kron, Kathleen A. (committee member)
- Smith, William K. (committee member)
- Zeyl, Clifford W. (committee member)
- date
- 2019-09-05T08:35:25Z (accessioned)
- 2020-03-04T09:30:14Z (available)
- 2019 (issued)
- degree
- Biology (discipline)
- embargo
- 2020-03-04 (terms)
- identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10339/94320 (uri)
- language
- en (iso)
- publisher
- Wake Forest University
- title
- FOREST RESPONSES TO CLIMATE CHANGE ALONG AN ANDES-TO-AMAZON ELEVATIONAL GRADIENT
- type
- Dissertation