BRS Jeremy Borderieux: Declining or thriving? Long-term monitoring program and climatic affinity reveal vascular plant abundance trends.

host: Isla Myers-Smith

Title talk: Declining or thriving? Long-term monitoring program and climatic affinity reveal vascular plant abundance trends.

Abstract: As climate is warming, locally warm-adapted plant species are being favored at the expense of cold-adapted species. This process known as thermophilization is of great concern because it can reduce biodiversity by triggering local extinctions of species and increasing the spread of common species. Long term monitoring programs coupled with an understanding of species climatic affinity has the potential to unveil how thermophilization alters communities. I will present results using two different monitoring programs, the French National Forest Inventory and the International Tundra EXperiment. While extinction of cold-adapted species was predominant in temperate forest understory, trends in the cold-constrained Arctic show a more nuanced story.

Short biography: Jeremy Borderieux is a postdoc in the faculty of forestry, currently working in Team Shrub (teamshrub.com) studying climate change impacts in the Arctic. He currently studies Arctic vegetation change at the circumpolar scale. Jeremy obtained his PhD in France, UMR Silva, INRAe, where he studied change in temperate understory vegetation and their relation to microclimate using National Forest Inventories.