Josep M Serra-Diaz

• PhD Environmental Sciences
• Professor (Assistant) at Paris Institute of Technology for Life, Food and Environmental Sciences

Aim Forest regeneration data provide an early signal of the persistence and migration of tree species, so we investigated whether species shifts due to climate change exhibit a common signal of response or whether changes vary by species. Location California Floristic Province, United States ; mediterranean biome. Methods We related Forest Invent...

Survival of early life stages is key for population expansion into new locations and for persistence of current populations (Harper and others 1977, Grubb 1977). Relative to adults, these early life stages are very sensitive to climate fluctuations (Ropert-Coudert et al. 2015), which often drive episodic or “event-limited” regeneration (e.g. pulses...

Aim To investigate the velocity of species‐specific exposure to climate change for mid‐ and late 21st century and develop metrics that quantify exposure to climate change over space and time. Location California Floristic Province, south‐western USA . Methods Occurrences from presence/absence inventories of eight Californian endemic tree species...

Context Many tree species will shift their distribution as the climate continues to change. To assess species’ range changes, modeling efforts often rely on climatic predictors, sometimes incorporating biotic interactions (e.g. competition or facilitation), but without integrating topographic complexity or the dynamics of disturbance and forest suc...

Aim Our aim was to map the climate dependence of tree species distributions (probability of occurrence) and forest growth (net primary productivity) by comparing the congruence and incongruence between correlative and process‐based modelling approaches. Location Iberian Peninsula, south‐western Europe. Methods We used forest inventory data for th...

The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average¹ and plant communities are responding through shifts in species abundance, composition and distribution2, 3–4. However, the direction and magnitude of local changes in plant diversity in the Arctic have not been quantified. Using a compilation of 42,234 records of 490 vascular plant sp...

Climate strongly influences the composition and diversity of forest plant communities. Recent studies have highlighted the role of tree canopies in shaping understory thermal conditions at small spatial scales (i.e. microclimate), especially in lowland forests. In mountain forests, however, the influence of topography in environmental conditions (i...

Aim The changing frequency and intensity of climatic extremes due to climate change can have sudden and adverse impacts on the distribution of species. While species distribution modelling is a vital tool in ecological applications, current approaches fail to fully capture the distribution of climatic extremes, particularly of rare events with the...

2023 was the hottest year in recorded history at the time of its recording ¹ and warmer than any in the past 125,000 years ² . Although the effects of this unprecedented year on human health, agriculture, and economies have been documented ³ , we know much less about its effects on global biodiversity, especially in poorly monitored regions. Here,...

Aim Species occurrence data are valuable information that enables one to estimate geographical distributions, characterize niches and their evolution, and guide spatial conservation planning. Rapid increases in species occurrence data stem from increasing digitization and aggregation efforts, and citizen science initiatives. However, persistent qua...

Brief introduction: What are microclimates and why are they important? Microclimate science has developed into a global discipline. Microclimate science is increasingly used to understand and mitigate climate and biodiversity shifts. Here, we provide an overview of the current status of microclimate ecology and biogeography in terrestrial ecosystem...

The ongoing climate change is triggering plant community thermophilization. This selection process ought to shift community composition towards species adapted to warmer climates but may also lead to biotic homogenization. The link between thermophilization and homogenization and the community dynamics that drive them (colonization and extinction)...

Trees are pivotal to global biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people, yet accelerating global changes threaten global tree diversity, making accurate species extinction risk assessments necessary. To identify species that require expert-based re-evaluation, we assess exposure to change in six anthropogenic threats over the last two decades...

Across the globe, tree species are under high anthropogenic pressure. Risks of extinction are notably more severe for species with restricted ranges and distinct evolutionary histories. Here, we use a global dataset covering 41,835 species (65.1% of known tree species) to assess the spatial pattern of tree species’ phylogenetic endemism, its macroe...

Predicting drought-induced mortality (DIM) of woody plants remains a key research challenge under climate change. Here, we integrate information on the edaphoclimatic niches, phylogeny and hydraulic traits of species to model the hydraulic risk of woody plants globally. We combine these models with species distribution records to estimate the hydra...

The ongoing climate change is triggering plant community thermophilization. Such selection process towards warm-adapted species may also lead to biotic homogenization. The link between those two processes and the community dynamic driving them (colonization and extinction) remain unknow but are critical to understand community response under rapid...

As Earth's climate has varied strongly through geological time, studying the impacts of past climate change on biodiversity helps to understand the risks from future climate change. However, it remains unclear how paleoclimate shapes spatial variation in biodiversity. Here, we assessed the influence of Quaternary climate change on spatial dissimila...

Aim The ongoing climate warming is expected to reshuffle understorey plant community composition by increasing the occurrence of warm‐adapted species at the expense of cold‐adapted species. This process has been evidenced before by a warming community temperature index (CTI) over time. However, data indicate that the local tree canopy can partly ex...

Aim It is crucial to monitor how the productivity of grasslands varies with its temporal stability for management of these ecosystems. However, identifying the direction of the productivity–stability relationship remains challenging because ecological stability has multiple components that can display neutral, positive or negative covariations. Fur...

Mounting evidence suggests that climate change will cause shifts of tree species range and abundance (biomass). Abundance changes under climate change are likely to occur prior to a detectable range shift. Disturbances are expected to directly affect tree species abundance and composition, and could profoundly influence tree species spatial distrib...

Safeguarding Earth’s tree diversity is a conservation priority due to the importance of trees for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services such as carbon sequestration. Here, we improve the foundation for effective conservation of global tree diversity by analyzing a recently developed database of tree species covering 46,752 species. We q...

Aim Addressing global environmental challenges requires access to biodiversity data across wide spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales. Availability of such data has increased exponentially recently with the proliferation of biodiversity databases. However, heterogeneous coverage, protocols, and standards have hampered integration among these datab...

One of the most fundamental questions in ecology is how many species inhabit the Earth. However, due to massive logistical and financial challenges and taxonomic difficulties connected to the species concept definition, the global numbers of species, including those of important and well-studied life forms such as trees, still remain largely unknow...

Tree diversity in Asia's tropical and subtropical forests is central to nature-based solutions. Species vulnerability to multiple threats, which affects the provision of ecosystem services, is poorly understood. We conducted a region-wide, spatially explicit vulnerability assessment (including overexploitation, fire, overgrazing, habitat conversion...

One of the most fundamental questions in ecology is how many species inhabit the Earth. However, due to massive logistical and financial challenges and taxonomic difficulties connected to the species concept definition, the global numbers of species, including those of important and well-studied life forms such as trees, still remain largely unknow...

Significance Tree diversity is fundamental for forest ecosystem stability and services. However, because of limited available data, estimates of tree diversity at large geographic domains still rely heavily on published lists of species descriptions that are geographically uneven in coverage. These limitations have precluded efforts to generate a g...

Quantifying anthropogenic climate change vulnerability is essential for estimating the risk of species extinction and developing conservation strategies. The Magnolia genus is widespread in the Americas and Asia, with nearly half of species currently threatened. Here, we used climate-niche factor analysis to study the vulnerability of Magnolia spec...

Aim: Addressing global environmental challenges requires access to biodiversity data across wide spatial, temporal and biological scales. Recent decades have witnessed an exponential increase of biodiversity information aggregated by biodiversity databases (hereafter ‘databases’). However, heterogeneous coverage, protocols, and standards of databas...

While calls for interdisciplinary research in environmental contexts are common, it often remains a struggle to integrate humanities/qualitative social sciences insights with those of bio-physical approaches. We propose that cross-disciplinary historical perspectives can open new avenues for collaboration among social and natural scientists while e...

High rates of climate change are currently exceeding many plant species' capacity to keep up with climate, leading to mismatches between climatic conditions and climatic preferences of the species present in a community. This disequilibrium between climate and community composition could diminish, however, when critical climate thresholds are excee...

Species distribution models (SDMs) constitute the most common class of models across ecology, evolution and conservation. The advent of ready‐to‐use software packages and increasing availability of digital geoinformation have considerably assisted the application of SDMs in the past decade, greatly enabling their broader use for informing conservat...

Description of the subject. This study evaluates the application of Boosted Regression Trees (BRT) for predicting beech dominant height in the Hyrcanian forests of Iran, inscribed as a UNESCO’s World Heritage due to its remarkable biodiversity. Objectives. It is widely accepted that tree growth can be influenced by a wide variety of factors such a...

Environmental variation within a species’ range may create contrasting selective pressures, leading to divergent selection and novel adaptations in various populations. Here, we explored the potential of ecological niche models (ENMs) coupled with common-garden experiments to identify environmentally contrasting areas inside a species’ range, hypot...

Both historical and contemporary environmental conditions determine present biodiversity patterns, but their relative importance is not well understood. One way to disentangle their relative effects is to assess how different dimensions of beta-diversity relate to past climatic changes, i.e., taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional compositional dis...

The Hyrcanian Forest region is rich in relict species, and endemic and endangered species. Although there are concerns about climate change, its influence on tree species in the Hyrcanian forests in the north of Iran is still unidentified. Taxus baccata is among the few conifer species found in the region, and the present study aims to evaluate the...

Trees are of vital importance for ecosystem functioning and services at local to global scales, yet we still lack a detailed overview of the global patterns of tree diversity and the underlying drivers, particularly the imprint of paleoclimate. Here, we present the high-resolution (110 km) worldwide mapping of tree species richness, functional and...

Species distribution models (SDMs) constitute the most common class of models across ecology, evolution and conservation. The advent of ready‐to‐use software packages and increasing availability of digital geoinformation have considerably assisted the application of SDMs in the past decade, greatly enabling their broader use for informing conservat...

Climate change is altering disturbance regimes and recovery rates of forests globally. The future of these forests will depend on how climate change interacts with management activities. Forest managers are in critical need of strategies to manage the effects of climate change. We co‐designed forest management scenarios with forest managers and sta...

Although trees are key to ecosystem functioning, many forests and tree species across the globe face strong threats. Preserving areas of high biodiversity is a core priority for conservation; however, different dimensions of biodiversity and varied conservation targets make it difficult to respond effectively to this challenge. Here, we (i) identif...

Iran's Hyrcanian forests cover a relatively narrow strip in the northeastern part of the country, and are among the most important and valuable ecosystems inscribed in United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage List. European yew Taxus baccata L. is a Tertiary relict in the region and a long‐lived dioec...

Geographically disparate populations within a species’ range may show important differences including variation in ecological, demographic, genetic and phenotypic characteristics. Based on the Center-Periphery Hypothesis, it is often assumed that environmental conditions are optimal in the geographic center of the range and stressful or suboptimal...

A key feature of life’s diversity is that some species are common but many more are rare. Nonetheless, at global scales, we do not know what fraction of biodiversity consists of rare species. Here, we present the largest compilation of global plant diversity to quantify the fraction of Earth’s plant biodiversity that are rare. A large fraction, ~36...

2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. In this Letter, the middle initial of author G. J. Nabuurs was omitted, and he should have been associated with an additional affiliation: ‘Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands’ (now added as affiliation 18...

A spatially explicit global map of tree symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi reveals that climate variables are the primary drivers of the distribution of different types of symbiosis.

The differential responses of co-occurring species in rich communities to climate change—particularly to drought episodes—have been fairly unexplored. Species distribution models (SDMs) are used to assess changes in species suitability under environmental shifts, but whether they can portray population and community responses is largely undetermine...

Tall trees and vertical forest structure are associated with increased productivity, biomass and wildlife habitat quality. While climate has been widely hypothesized to control forest structure at broad scales, other variables could be key at fine scales, and are associated with forest management. In this study we identify the environmental conditi...

The impacts of climatic changes on forests may appear gradually on time scales of years to centuries due to the long generation times of trees. Consequently, current forest extent may not reflect current climatic patterns. In contrast with these lagged responses, abrupt transitions in forests under climate change may occur in environments where alt...

Trees play crucial roles in the biosphere and societies worldwide, with a total of 60,065 tree species currently identified. Increasingly, a large amount of data on tree species occurrences is being generated worldwide: from inventories to pressed plants. While many of these data are currently available in big databases, several challenges hamper t...

As trees are long-lived organisms, the impacts of climate change on forest communities may not be apparent on the time scale of years to decades. While lagged responses to environmental change are common in forested systems, potential for abrupt transitions under climate change may occur in environments where alternative vegetation states are influ...

Climate change is expected to cause geographic shifts in tree species’ ranges, but such shifts may not keep pace with climate changes because seed dispersal distances are often limited and competition-induced changes in community composition can be relatively slow. Disturbances may speed changes in community composition, but the interactions among...

En 2016 implementamos un sistema de seminarios de enseñanza en formato de videos libres y accesibles desde internet, con la finalidad de dar a conocer de forma sencilla y en castellano, las bases conceptuales y aplicaciones de la ecología espacial y los modelos de nicho ecológico en estudios de ecología, conservación biológica, epidemiología y agro...

Abstract.—In 2016, we implemented a system of seminars for teaching, in open access video format available via the Internet, aiming to show in Spanish and in simple form the conceptual bases and applications of ecological niche modeling in studies of ecology, biological conservation, epidemiology, and agro-biodiversity, as well as its implementatio...

During the last decades, plant die-off has been reported worldwide as a result of increased frequency and intensity of extreme drought events. From a niche perspective, a species performance should decrease as the climatic conditions defining a drought event differ from those characterizing the species climatic niche (the average conditions experie...

2016. Shrinking windows of opportunity for oak seedling establishment in southern California mountains. Ecosphere 7(11): Abstract. Seedling establishment is a critical step that may ultimately govern tree species' distribution shifts under environmental change. Annual variation in the location of seed rain and microclimates results in transient " w...

Aim Plant distributions and vegetation dynamics underpin key global phenomena, including biogeochemical cycling, ecosystem productivity and terrestrial biodiversity patterns. Aggregated and remotely collected ‘big data’ are required to forecast the effects of global change on plant communities. We synthesize advances in developing and exploiting bi...

Context Predicting climate-driven species’ range shifts depends substantially on species’ exposure to climate change. Mountain landscapes contain a wide range of topoclimates and soil characteristics that are thought to mediate range shifts and buffer species’ exposure. Quantifying fine-scale patterns of exposure across mountainous terrain is a key...

Significance Global terrestrial vegetation plays a critical role in biogeochemical cycles and provides important ecosystem services. Vegetation has been altered by anthropogenic global change drivers including land-use change, altered disturbance regimes, invasive species, and climate change, for decades to centuries, or in some cases millennia. Ve...

Climate-induced drought is a major issue affecting a variety of forests and woodlands worldwide. However, studies that investigate how coexisting species within plant communities respond to periods of drought are scarce. These responses are expected to correlate with species characteristics, particularly with their bioclimatic niche, which is consi...

Background/Question/Methods Global change poses many challenges to ecologists seeking to provide a good estimation of changes in species distributions in the Anthropocene era. Through the combination of different modeling approaches, ecologists seek to address how the changing climate and atmosphere affect processes directly linked to species ran...

It's time for a crisper image of the Face of the Earth: Landsat and climate time series for massive land cover & climate change mapping at detailed resolution. Combining climate dynamics and land cover at a relative coarse resolution allows a very interesting approach to global studies, because in many cases these studies are based on a quite high...

The response of plant species to future climate conditions is probably dependent on their ecological characteristics, including climatic niche, demographic rates and functional traits. Using forest inventory data from 27 dominant woody species in Spanish forests, we explore the relationships between species characteristics and projected changes in...

The concept of landscape in Europe has moved from a scale analysis towards a holistic concept defined by laws and a European directive. In economically depressed mountain areas, the landscape represents both a resource and an opportunity for development, and the task facing managers of natural parks is not easy. The present study applied a geograph...

Pyrenean regions have undergone deep changes in the past 50 years. These changes have affected their socioeconomic structures, leading to a shift in land management, which is eventually reflected on the landscape. Two opposite processes are found throughout the mountain range: abandonment and intensification. Land abandonment results from a shift i...

Abies alba Mill. (European silver fir) and Fagus sylvatica L. (beech) are Eurosiberian species dispersed over the Iberian Peninsula. Climate change predictions indicate a rise in temperature and a decrease in precipitation in this region, threatening the future existence of these species. In the present study we analyzed the future topo-climatic su...

Background/Question/Methods Niche-based models (NBM) are based on the empirical statistical modeling approaches that correlate environmental variables to species’ presence and / or absence to determine its distribution. NBM profile the bioclimatic envelope of the species (realized niche) through a number of different statistical techniques in ord...

Assessing the potential future of current forest stands is a key to design conservation strategies and understanding potential future impacts to ecosystem service supplies. This is particularly true in the Mediterranean basin, where important future climatic changes are expected. Here, we assess and compare two commonly used modeling approaches (ni...

Environmental classification addresses issues involving the representation and analysis of continuous and variable ecological data. This study creates a methodology to define topo-climatic landscapes (TCL) in the north-west of Catalonia, which is situated in the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula. TCL provide data regarding the ecological behavior...

The evaluation of the geographical space where the protected nature reserves are placed, besides their natural value, requires another type of analysis that helps to value the space from a global and holistic point of view. Georges Bertrand suggested in 2000 a new method: the GTP model. This model describes and analyses the geographical space syste...

La aprobación de la LEY 8/2005, de 8 de junio, de protección, gestión y ordenación del paisaje de Cataluña ha puesto las bases de los “Catálogos de Paisaje” (artículo 10): 1) “Los catálogos son los documentos de carácter descriptivo y prospectivo que determinan la tipología de paisajes de Cataluña, identifican sus valores y su estado de conservació...

Landscape classification tackles issues related to the representation and analysis of continuous and variable ecological data. In this study, a methodology is created in order to define topo-climatic landscapes (TCL) in the north-west of Catalonia (north-east of the Iberian Peninsula). TCLs relate the ecological behaviour of a landscape in terms of...