Northern Research Station

Title: Estimating potential habitat for 134 eastern US tree species under six climate scenarios

Author: Iverson, Louis R.; Prasad, Anantha M.; Matthews, Stephen N.; Peters, Matthew

Date: 2008

Source: Forest Ecology and Management. 254: 390-406.

Description: We modeled and mapped, using the predictive data mining tool Random Forests, 134 tree species from the eastern United States for potential response to several scenarios of climate change. Each species was modeled individually to show current and potential future habitats according to two emission scenarios (high emissions on current trajectory and reasonable conservation of energy implemented) and three climate models: the Parallel Climate Model, the Hadley CM3 model, and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory model. Since we model potential suitable habitats of species, our results should not be interpreted as actual changes in ranges of the species. We also evaluated both emission scenarios under an "average" future climate from all three models. Climate change could have large impacts on suitable habitat for tree species in the eastern United States, especially under a high emissions trajectory.

Keywords: climate change, eastern United States, tree species distributions, composition changes, species shifts, random forests, regression tree analysis, bagging

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Citation

Iverson, Louis R.; Prasad, Anantha M.; Matthews, Stephen N.; Peters, Matthew  2008.  Estimating potential habitat for 134 eastern US tree species under six climate scenarios.   Forest Ecology and Management. 254: 390-406..