Vázquez-Ramírez Jerónimo, Venn Susanna E
Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Hwy, Burwood, VIC 3125, Australia.
Plants (Basel). 2021 Apr 14;10(4):768. doi: 10.3390/plants10040768.
The early life-history stages of plants, such as germination and seedling establishment, depend on favorable environmental conditions. Changes in the environment at high altitude and high latitude regions, as a consequence of climate change, will significantly affect these life stages and may have profound effects on species recruitment and survival. Here, we synthesize the current knowledge of climate change effects on treeline, tundra, and alpine plants' early life-history stages. We systematically searched the available literature on this subject up until February 2020 and recovered 835 potential articles that matched our search terms. From these, we found 39 studies that matched our selection criteria. We characterized the studies within our review and performed a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the extracted meta-data regarding the climatic effects likely to change in these regions, including projected warming, early snowmelt, changes in precipitation, nutrient availability and their effects on seed maturation, seed dormancy, germination, seedling emergence and seedling establishment. Although the studies showed high variability in their methods and studied species, the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the extracted data allowed us to detect existing patterns and knowledge gaps. For example, warming temperatures seemed to favor all studied life stages except seedling establishment, a decrease in precipitation had a strong negative effect on seed stages and, surprisingly, early snowmelt had a neutral effect on seed dormancy and germination but a positive effect on seedling establishment. For some of the studied life stages, data within the literature were too limited to identify a precise effect. There is still a need for investigations that increase our understanding of the climate change impacts on high altitude and high latitude plants' reproductive processes, as this is crucial for plant conservation and evidence-based management of these environments. Finally, we make recommendations for further research based on the identified knowledge gaps.
植物的早期生活史阶段，如发芽和幼苗建立，依赖于适宜的环境条件。由于气候变化，高海拔和高纬度地区的环境变化将显著影响这些生活阶段，并可能对物种的补充和生存产生深远影响。在这里，我们综合了目前关于气候变化对树线、苔原和高山植物早期生活史阶段影响的知识。我们系统地检索了截至2020年2月关于该主题的现有文献，共检索到835篇符合我们检索词的潜在文章。从中，我们找到了39项符合我们选择标准的研究。我们对综述中的研究进行了特征描述，并对提取的关于这些地区可能发生变化的气候影响的元数据进行了定性和定量分析，包括预计的变暖、早融雪、降水变化、养分有效性及其对种子成熟、种子休眠、发芽、幼苗出土和幼苗建立的影响。尽管这些研究在方法和研究物种上存在很大差异，但对提取数据的定性和定量分析使我们能够发现现有的模式和知识空白。例如，气温升高似乎有利于除幼苗建立之外的所有研究生活阶段，降水减少对种子阶段有强烈的负面影响，令人惊讶的是，早融雪对种子休眠和发芽有中性影响，但对幼苗建立有积极影响。对于一些研究的生活阶段，文献中的数据过于有限，无法确定确切的影响。仍然需要进行调查，以增进我们对气候变化对高海拔和高纬度植物繁殖过程影响的理解，因为这对于这些环境的植物保护和基于证据的管理至关重要。最后，我们根据已确定的知识空白提出了进一步研究的建议。
