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Species response curves of oak species along climatic gradients in Turkey

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Abstract

The genus Quercus is one of the most important tree species in Turkey. However, little is known on the ecological preferences of Turkish oak species regarding climate. We analyzed species response curves using a HOF-model approach to describe the general pattern of oak distributions along climatic gradients and to identify the driving climatic factors for eight oak species in Turkey. While climate data were extracted from the free available worldclim dataset, occurrence data on oak species were assembled from the literature into a vegetation database (n = 1,104). From the analyzed species response curves, only fa ew (16%) showed unimodal responses, while most were linear (31%) or exhibited a threshold response (31%). The driving factors were seasonality of temperature and seasonality of precipitation, indicating that Turkish oak species can be characterized best by the preference of climatic stability. These findings have important implications for conservation and climate change research, which usually focuses on trends of the mean values of temperature or precipitation but less often on the seasonality. In this study, we further tested whether niche optima derived from raw mean values of occurrences could replace missing model optima due to non-responsiveness of HOF models of type I. However, we did not find this to be a satisfactory solution. Finally, we discuss the need for the construction of a national database based on phytosociological relevés for Turkey.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Florian Jansen for adjusting his R-package for our needs, as well as Magda Pellowski and Sigrid Suchrow for their help with the HOF models. Furthermore, we thank Stephan Hennekens who helped us during the establishment phase of the database. We are grateful to Tracy Erwin for improving our English. Finally, we want to thank all participants from the 9th vegetation database conference and the organizing committee because at this conference the idea for this project was born, mainly due to the good atmosphere and many ideas.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology-Botany, Celal Bayar University, Manisa, Turkey

    Emin Uğurlu

  2. Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution of Plants, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Jens Oldeland

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  1. Emin Uğurlu
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  2. Jens Oldeland
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Correspondence to Jens Oldeland.

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Uğurlu, E., Oldeland, J. Species response curves of oak species along climatic gradients in Turkey. Int J Biometeorol 56, 85–93 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-010-0399-9

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