Abstract ID: 3.13798 | Not reviewed | Requested as: Talk | TBA | TBA

The speed with which climate change alters biodiversity through range expansions and local extinctions underlines the urgent need for robust approaches to assess species and community vulnerability. If we are to predict the rate and trajectory of plant and community responses to climate change we need experiments that can unravel the processes that underlie ecological responses to a changing climate. Many experiments miss key processes of community change, however, such as the colonization by novel, warm adapted species, and also don’t set-up clear baseline expectations against which to compare the rate and direction of species responses and community change. One approach that allows explicitly tackling these challenges is whole-community transplant experiments, whereby whole communities (or turfs) are transplanted from higher to lower elevation sites in mountains, exposing them simultaneously to the abiotic effects of a warmer climate and to the biotic effects of invasion by low-elevation species. Here we present a synthesis of such 44 turf transplant experiments from throughout the northern hemisphere, and assess and explore both consistent responses across sites and context-dependencies in plant, vegetation, and soil community responses. At the species level, we found consistent performance optima for species approximately 5C cooler than their range centre, suggesting that current species distributions are lagging from contemporary and historical climate changes. Non-linear trajectories of community change revealed both substantial time-lags and deviations from convergence towards the low elevation community composition expected based on “space-for-time” predictions. These findings imply that novel community compositions might develop and persist for long periods as climates warm. Our approach provides a useful tool to identify which species and communities are most vulnerable to biotic and abiotic consequences of climate change. This will be crucial for managing biodiversity and ecosystem function with further climate change.