Shifts in soil and plant functional diversity along an altitudinal gradient in the French Alps.

Objectives: Altitude integrates changes in environmental conditions that determine shifts in vegetation, including temperature, precipitation, solar radiation and edaphogenetic processes. In turn, vegetation alters soil biophysical properties through litter input, root growth, microbial and macrofaunal interactions. The belowground traits of plant communities modify soil processes in different ways, but it is not known how root traits influence soil biota at the community level.

Background mortality drivers of European tree species: climate change matters.

Increases in tree mortality rates have been highlighted in different biomes over the past decades. However, disentangling the effects of climate change on the temporal increase in tree mortality from those of management and forest dynamics remains a challenge. Using a modelling approach taking tree and stand characteristics into account, we sought to evaluate the impact of climate change on background mortality for the most common European tree species.

Soil and climate differently impact NDVI patterns according to the season and the stand type.

Several studies use satellite-based normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) to monitor the impact of climate change on vegetation covers. Good understanding of the drivers of NDVI patterns is hindered by the difficulties in disentangling the effects of environmental factors from anthropogenic changes, by the limited number of environmental predictors studied, and by the diversity of responses according to periods and land covers. This study aims to improve our understanding of the different environmental drivers of NDVI spatial variations for different stand type characteristics of mountain and Mediterranean biomes.

Tree Size Inequality Reduces Forest Productivity: An Analysis Combining Inventory Data for Ten European Species and a Light Competition Model.

Plant structural diversity is usually considered as beneficial for ecosystem functioning. For instance, numerous studies have reported positive species diversity-productivity relationships in plant communities. However, other aspects of structural diversity such as individual size inequality have been far less investigated.

Early signs of range disjunction of submountainous plant species: an unexplored consequence of future and contemporary climate changes.

Poleward and upward species range shifts are the most commonly anticipated and studied consequences of climate warming. However, these global responses to climate change obscure more complex distribution change patterns. We hypothesize that the spatial arrangement of mountain ranges and, consequently, climatic gradients in Europe, will result in range disjunctions.