Département de biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada J1K 2R1.
Am J Bot. 2013 Jul;100(7):1294-305. doi: 10.3732/ajb.1200503. Epub 2013 Jun 26.
Predicting the future ecological impact of global change drivers requires understanding how these same drivers have acted in the past to produce the plant populations and communities we see today. Historical ecological data sources have made contributions of central importance to global change biology, but remain outside the toolkit of most ecologists. Here we review the strengths and weaknesses of four unconventional sources of historical ecological data: land survey records, "legacy" vegetation data, historical maps and photographs, and herbarium specimens. We discuss recent contributions made using these data sources to understanding the impacts of habitat disturbance and climate change on plant populations and communities, and the duration of extinction-colonization time lags in response to landscape change. Historical data frequently support inferences made using conventional ecological studies (e.g., increases in warm-adapted species as temperature rises), but there are cases when the addition of different data sources leads to different conclusions (e.g., temporal vegetation change not as predicted by chronosequence studies). The explicit combination of historical and contemporary data sources is an especially powerful approach for unraveling long-term consequences of multiple drivers of global change. Despite the limitations of historical data, which include spotty and potentially biased spatial and temporal coverage, they often represent the only means of characterizing ecological phenomena in the past and have proven indispensable for characterizing the nature, magnitude, and generality of global change impacts on plant populations and communities.
预测全球变化驱动因素对未来的生态影响，需要了解这些驱动因素过去是如何作用的，从而产生我们今天所看到的植物种群和群落。历史生态数据来源对全球变化生物学做出了至关重要的贡献，但它们仍然不在大多数生态学家的工具包中。在这里，我们回顾了四种非传统历史生态数据来源的优缺点：土地调查记录、“遗留”植被数据、历史地图和照片以及植物标本。我们讨论了最近利用这些数据源来理解栖息地干扰和气候变化对植物种群和群落的影响，以及对景观变化的灭绝-定居时滞的持续时间的研究贡献。历史数据经常支持使用传统生态学研究得出的推断（例如，随着温度升高，适应温暖气候的物种增加），但也有一些情况下，添加不同的数据来源会导致不同的结论（例如，植被随时间的变化与时间序列研究的预测不同）。明确结合历史和当代数据源是一种特别有力的方法，可以揭示全球变化多种驱动因素的长期后果。尽管历史数据存在局限性，包括空间和时间覆盖范围的稀疏性和潜在的偏差，但它们通常是描述过去生态现象的唯一手段，并且已经被证明对于描述全球变化对植物种群和群落的影响的性质、规模和普遍性是不可或缺的。
