Natura 2000 forest habitats: climatic debt in lowlands and thermophilization in highlands
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Natura 2000 forest habitats: climatic debt in lowlands and thermophilization in highlands Lise Maciejewski1,2 • Emilien Kuhn1 Jean-Claude Ge´gout1
•
Anne Ge´gout-Petit3
•
Received: 10 January 2020 / Revised: 21 August 2020 / Accepted: 23 August 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Natura 2000 is a European network of sites dedicated to the conservation of vulnerable habitats. The definitions of Natura 2000 habitats are mainly based on plant communities. We investigated if the increase of the dominance of warm-adapted species observed in plant communities, described as thermophilization, had already led to measurable changes in Natura 2000 forest habitats. We created 5701 pairs of neighboring forest plots by gathering plots surveyed before 1987 and after 1997 to reflect historical and recent climatic conditions. A Natura 2000 habitat type was assigned to each vegetation plot using an automatic classification program. We calculated a temperature index that synthesized the temperature range of each habitat, and compared the habitat temperature indexes of the recent and historical plots of each pair. We highlighted a significant overall shift of 4.8% ± 1.78 (CI 95%) of the pairs toward warmer habitats over the studied period. While the shift was not significant in lowlands, 11.1% ± 3.0 (CI 95%) of the pairs evolved toward warmer habitats in highlands. The excess of pairs with a warmer habitat in the recent period was interpreted as thermophilization of Natura 2000 forest habitats. Therefore, global warming has been strong enough to induce actual changes at the coarsegrained habitat resolution specifically targeted by public policies. The absence of significant results in lowlands suggests the existence of unrealized potential habitat changes, which can be considered as a climatic debt. These results call for differential prioritization levels and implementations of public policies for nature conservation in lowlands and highlands. Keywords Climate change Forest ecosystem Global warming Habitat of Community interest Habitats Directive Public policies
Communicated by Dirk Sven Schmeller. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-02002044-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Lise Maciejewski [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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Biodiversity and Conservation
Introduction Nature conservation was initially developed for species preservation (Kiss 2005). Faced with the homogenization of ecosystems and landscapes due to human omnipresence, conservationists aimed for a more integrated vision of nature. Plant ecologists have developed and used the concept of habitat for a century, close to the notion of ecosystem but initially based on plant community (Yapp 1922). In Europe, legal frameworks and most of the efforts dedicated to biodiversity conservation are committed to habita
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