Old and ancient trees are life history lottery winners and act as evolutionary buffers against long-term environmental change
Cannon, C. H.; Piovesan, G.; Munne-Bosch, S.
Show abstract
Trees can live many centuries with sustained fecundity and death is largely stochastic. We use a neutral stochastic model to examine the demographic patterns that emerge over time, across a range of population sizes and empirically observed mortality rates. A small proportion of trees ([~]1% at 1.5% mortality) are life-history lottery winners, achieving ages >10-20x median age. Maximum age increases with bigger populations and lower mortality rates. One quarter of trees ([~]24%) achieve ages that are 3-4 times greater than median age. Three age classes (Mature, Old, and Ancient) contribute unique historical diversity across complex environmental cycles. Ancient trees are an emergent property of forests that requires many centuries to generate. They rradically change generation time variance and population fitness, bridging infrequent environmental cycles. These life-history lottery winners are vital to future forest dynamics and invaluable data about environmental history and individual longevity. Old-growth forests contain trees that cannot be replaced through restoration or regeneration in the near future. They simply must be protected to preserve their unique diversity.
Matching journals
The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.