Climatic resilience after extreme drought in Mediterranean shrubland plant communities
Díaz Borrego, Raquel (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Biologia Animal, de Biologia Vegetal i d'Ecologia)
Lloret Maya, Francisco (Centre de Recerca Ecològica i d'Aplicacions Forestals)
Jaime, Luciana (Universitat de Lleida. Departament de Ciència i Enginyeria Forestal i Agrícola)
Margalef Marrasé, Jordi (Centro de Investigaciones sobre Desertificación)
Moya-Pérez, J.M. (Universidad de Murcia. Departamento de Ecología e Hidrología)
Pérez Navarro, María Ángeles (King's College London. Department of Geography)

Date:	2025
Abstract:	Extreme climatic events are increasing with climate change, producing changes in communities' climatic characterization. So, mismatches (climatic disequilibrium, CD) between climatic conditions inferred from species' requirements (community inferred climate, CIC) and macroclimate may undergo changes with extreme climatic events. Climatic resilience is defined as the ability to maintain or recover community climatic characteristics, regardless of species' identity, after disturbance or stress. We evaluated the dynamics of plant community climatic characterization in Mediterranean shrublands that experienced a drought event, considering CIC and CD. CIC was calculated by averaging species' climatic niche centroids, weighted by species' relative abundances, in the multivariate environmental space obtained from the climate of the species' geographical occurrence. CD was estimated as Euclidean distance in this space between the observed historic macroclimate and CIC. Climatic resistance was inferred by the distance between pre-drought and drought CIC, climatic resilience by the distance between pre-drought and post-drought CIC, and relative climatic resilience by the same distance weighted by the climatic displacement suffered during the drought. We found a significant reduction in community CD after drought, with CIC becoming more arid, likely due to environmental filtering of those species with wetter distribution. Communities with less pre-drought CD showed higher climatic resistance but pre-drought CD did not explain climatic resilience. Communities with more arid CIC exhibited high climatic resilience regardless of drought impact (high relative climatic resilience), except for certain communities exhibiting highly arid CICs. Communities with less arid CIC showed low relative climatic resilience, as their resilience was associated with high resistance. The study highlights community impacts by extreme droughts through filtering of species distributed in more humid climates. This produces changes in the CD of communities, whose resilience is determined by CIC, pre-drought CD, and drought impact in terms of CIC change.
Grants:	Agencia Estatal de Investigación FPU20/06049 Agencia Estatal de Investigación PID2020-115264RB-I00 Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca 2017/SGR-1001 Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca 2021/SGR-00849
Note:	Altres ajuts: acords transformatius de la UAB
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	Climatic disequilibrium ; Drought impact ; Resilience ; Resistance ; Species climatic niche ; Thermophilization
Published in:	Ecography, Vol. 2025, Issue 9 (September 2025) , art. e07835, ISSN 1600-0587

DOI: 10.1002/ecog.07835

15 p, 1.5 MB

The record appears in these collections:
Research literature > UAB research groups literature > Research Centres and Groups (research output) > Experimental sciences > CREAF (Centre de Recerca Ecològica i d'Aplicacions Forestals)
Articles > Research articles
Articles > Published articles