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Species’ ranges based on their mean simulated LAI over 2010–2020 (corresponding to the aggregation period for the GDF dataset) with GDF occurrence vector data superimposed as orange polygons: a. C. libani, b. P. brutia, c. P. nigra
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The central aim of this study is to estimate the current potential distribution of Turkey’s forests and their composition in absence of anthropogenic landcover change, and in this manner to contribute to past studies on the distribution of European forest taxa by filling an important spatial gap. For our simulations, we used high resolution climate...
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... (halep çamı) (Ekberzade et al., 2022), accounting for the majority of wildfire cases (~ 65%). Türkiye exhibits an evident seasonal pattern throughout the summer months, especially along the coastline that stretches from Marmara to the Mediterranean (Fig. 5). ...
Spatiotemporal inventories of natural hazards are essential for comprehending the building of resilient societies; yet, restricted access to global inventories hinders the advancement of mitigation strategies. Consequently, we developed an approach that enhances the capability of online newspapers in the creation of natural hazard inventory by utilizing web scraping, natural language processing (NLP), clustering, and geolocation of textual data. Here, we use the online newspapers from 1997 to 2023 in Türkiye to employ our approach. In the first stage, we retrieved 15,569 news by using our tr-news-15 scraper tool considering wildfire, flood, landslide, and sinkhole-related natural hazard news. Further, we utilized NLP preprocessing approaches to refine the raw texts obtained from newspaper sources, which were subsequently clustered into 4 natural hazard groups resulting in 3928 news. In the final stage of the approach, we developed a method, which geolocates the news using the Open Street Map (OSM) Nominatim tool, ending up with a total of 13940 natural hazard incidents derived from news comprising multiple incidents across various locations. As a result, we mapped 9609 floods, 1834 20 wildfires, 1843 landslides, and 654 sinkhole formation incidents from online newspaper sources, showing spatiotemporally consistent distribution with existing literature. Consequently, we illustrated the potential of online newspaper articles in the development of natural hazard inventories with our approach from the web sources as text data to map by leveraging the capabilities of web scraping, NLP, and mapping techniques.
... Since Classic Antiquity, it has been widely planted as landscape and garden trees, leading in several countries to long-lasting debates whether it is a native species or archaeophyte (Lim, 2012). In Turkey, for instance, several enclaves of spontaneous stone pine, including some of very restricted extension in the northern Black Sea region, have been considered by some botanists as putative native, but by others as feral, because palaeontological and archaeological registers for stone pine before Antiquity are still missing (Bonari et al., 2020;Ekberzade et al., 2022). In Lebanon, although stone pine has been considered natural or at least naturalised since Antiquity by many authors, all extant stone pine forest stands date actually later than 1868. ...
Pinus is the largest genus of conifers with more than 120 species. Some of the most extended and relevant forest trees in the northern hemisphere are pines. About 30 pine species bear seeds large enough to be collected for human consumption. Those seed kernels, also known as pine nuts, are one of the first known foods of forest-dwelling humans in Eurasia, including Neanderthals. Similarly, ancient American people relied on local pine nuts as a seasonal staple food. This chapter highlights the origin, evolutionary and cultural history and genetic diversity of some of the most relevant ‘stone pines’, namely Pinus pinea from the Mediterranean, Pinus koraiensis from Northeast Asia, and the Mexican Pinus cembroides. Their contrastive history is an example of different evolutionary strategies adopted by tree species.
At the current juncture with climate change, centennial projections of species distributions in biodiversity hotspots, using dynamic vegetation models may provide vital insight into conservation efforts. This study aims to answer: (1) if climate change progresses under a business-as-usual scenario of anthropogenic emissions for this century, how may the forest ranges be affected? (2) will there be potential regional extinctions of the taxa simulated? (3) may any site emerge as a potential refugium? Study Area: Anatolian Peninsula and its surroundings, longitudes 24–50° E, latitudes 33–46° N. Time Period: 1961-2100. Major Taxa Studied: 25 woody species and a C3 grass-type. Method: Keeping a spatial window large enough to track potential changes in the vegetation range and composition especially in the mountain ranges within the study area, we parameterized a process-based regional-to-global dynamic vegetation model (LPJ-GUESS v 4.1), forced it with ERA5-Land reanalysis for the historical period, and five different bias-corrected centennial global circulation model (GCM) datasets under SSP5-8.5, and simulated the dynamic responses of key forest species. Bivariate spatio-temporal maps from the simulation results were constructed for final analysis. Results: A significant increase in woody taxa biomass for the majority of our study area, towards the end of the century was simulated, where temperate taxa with high tolerance for drought and a wider range of temperatures took dominance. The mountain ranges in our study area stood out as critical potential refugia for cold favoring species. There were no regional extinctions of taxa, however, important changes in areal dominance and potential future forest composition were simulated. Main Conclusions: Our simulation results suggest a high potential for future forest cover in our study region by the end of the century under a high emissions scenario, sans human presence, with important changes in vegetation composition, including encroachment of grasslands ecosystems by woody taxa.
