Late quaternary plant zonation and climate in southeastern Utah

Plant macrofossils from packrat middens in two southeastern Utah caves outline development of modern plant zonation from the late Wisconsin. Allen Canyon Cave (2195 m) and Fishmouth Cave (1585 m) are located along a continuous gradient of outcropping Navajo Sandstone that extends from the Abajo Mountains south to the San Juan River. By holding the site constant, changes in the floral composition for a plot of less than one hectare can be observed, even if sporadically, over tens of millennia. At Allen Canyon Cave, Engelmann spruce-alpine fir forest was replaced by the present vegetation consisting of pinyon-juniper woodland on exposed ridgetops and cliffside stands of Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, and aspen. Xerophytic woodland plants such as pinyon, plains prickly pear, and narrowleaf yucca arrived sometime in the middle Holocene between 7200 and 3400 B.P. At Fishmouth Cave, Utah juniper in Holocene middens replaced blue spruce, limber pine, Douglas fir, and dwarf and Rocky Mountain junipers in late Wisconsin samples. Disharmonious associations for the late Wisconsin occur only at the lower site with the xerophytes Mormon tea, plains prickly pear, and narrowleaf yucca growing alongside subalpine conifers. One possible explanation involves the late Wisconsin absence of ponderosa and pinyon pines from the Colorado Plateaus. Released from competition at their lower limits, subalpine conifers were able to expand into lower elevations and mix with xerophytic plants found today in understories of pinyon-juniper and ponderosa pine woodlands. Quantitative climatic estimates are derived for the late Wisconsin by applying vertical gradients for temperature and precipitation to the amount of vegetation depression. The Fishmouth Cave sequence indicates a minimum lowering of 850 m for blue spruce, limber pine, and dwarf juniper. A depression of at least 700 m for Engelmann spruce and alpine fir is suggested for the Allen Canyon locality. Use of conservatively low gradients for stations below 2080 m yields a 3–4 C cooling from present mean annual temperature and 35 to 60 percent more rainfall than today. Steeper gradients associated with more mountainous terrain suggest a 5 C lowering in temperature and up to 120 percent increase over modern precipitation.        

A 4000-year record of woodland vegetation from Wind River Canyon, central Wyoming

Plant macrofossil analyses of 16 radiocarbon-dated woodrat middens spanning the past 4000 years from the Wind River Canyon region in central Wyoming provide information concerning late Holocene development of juniper woodlands. The study sites are currently dominated by Juniperus osteosperma , with J. scopulorum present locally. Woodlands in the region were dominated by J. scopulorum from ca 4000 yr BP until at least 2800 yr BP. Juniperus osteosperma invaded and expanded before 2000 yr BP. This expansion fits a regional pattern of J. osteosperma colonization and expansion in north central Wyoming during a relatively dry period between 2800 and 1000 yr BP. At the time the Wind River Canyon region was colonized by J. osteosperma , the species had populations 50-100 km to both the north and south. Long-distance seed dispersal was required for establishment in the study area. Genetic studies are necessary to identify source populations and regions.     

Warming experiments underpredict plant phenological responses to climate change

Warming experiments are increasingly relied on to estimate plant responses to global climate change. For experiments to provide meaningful predictions of future responses, they should reflect the empirical record of responses to temperature variability and recent warming, including advances in the timing of flowering and leafing. We compared phenology (the timing of recurring life history events) in observational studies and warming experiments spanning four continents and 1,634 plant species using a common measure of temperature sensitivity (change in days per degree Celsius). We show that warming experiments underpredict advances in the timing of flowering and leafing by 8.5-fold and 4.0-fold, respectively, compared with long-term observations. For species that were common to both study types, the experimental results did not match the observational data in sign or magnitude. The observational data also showed that species that flower earliest in the spring have the highest temperature sensitivities, but this trend was not reflected in the experimental data. These significant mismatches seem to be unrelated to the study length or to the degree of manipulated warming in experiments. The discrepancy between experiments and observations, however, could arise from complex interactions among multiple drivers in the observational data, or it could arise from remediable artefacts in the experiments that result in lower irradiance and drier soils, thus dampening the phenological responses to manipulated warming. Our results introduce uncertainty into ecosystem models that are informed solely by experiments and suggest that responses to climate change that are predicted using such models should be re-evaluated.     

Historical variations in δ 13 C leaf of herbarium specimens in the southwestern U.S.

The uncontrolled, global increase in atmospheric CO 2 concentration (ca 80 ppmv) and decline in δ 13 C air (ca 1.5%) since industrialization provide experimental boundary conditions by which to assess physiological response of vegetation. To examine consequences of these global atmospheric changes in the southwestern U.S., 350 specimens of Atriplex confertifolia, A. canescens, Ephedra viridis, Pinus edulis, P. flexilis, Juniperus scopulorum, and Quercus turbinella of precisely known age spanning the last 150 years were acquired from 9 herbaria. Cellulose analysis of δ 13 C plant and estimation of isotopic discrimination (Δ) permitted calculation of water-use efficiency (A/g). The δ 13 C plant chronologies of C 4 Atriplex spp. show some promise as a reliable proxy for δ 13 C air because their mean trends approximate the known δ 13 C air chronology. However, the high variability would necessitate multiple samples at any time period to accurately represent the mean. The generally increasing A/g trends of the 5 C 3 species are particularly pronounced for P. edulis and, after the 1950s, for J. scopulorum, but less evident for P. flexilis, E. viridis, and Q. turbinella, evidencing possible differences in species response to rising CO 2 concentrations. The trends are statistically noisy, however, possibly due to complex microclimates, extreme seasonality, and great interannual variability typical of the southwestern U.S. Herbarium specimens, at least in the Southwest, may be less useful for precise detection of direct CO 2 effects on plant physiology than tree rings, where the variability can be constrained to a single individual over time.