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Abstract :
[en] While the combination of warmer and drier mean climatic conditions can have severe impacts on ecosystems, extreme events like droughts or heat waves that break the gradual climate change can have more long-term consequences on ecosystem composition, functioning and carbon storage. Hence, it is essential to assess the changes in climate variability and the changes in frequency of extreme events projected for the future. Here, the process-based dynamic vegetation model CARAIB DVM was used to evaluate and analyse how future climate and extreme events will affect European terrestrial plants.
To quantify the uncertainties in climatic projections and their potential impacts on ecosystems, the vegetation model was driven with the outputs of different regional climatic models, nested in CMIP5 GCM projections for the EURO-CORDEX project: ALADIN53 (Météo-France/CNRM), RACMO22E (KNMI), RCA4 (SMHI) and REMO2009 (MPI-CSC) RCMs. These daily climatic scenarios are at a high spatial resolution (0.11°, ≈ 12 km). CARAIB simulations were performed across Europe over the historical period 1971-2005 and the future period 2006-2100 under RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 emission scenarios. We simulated a set of 99 individual species (47 herbs, 12 shrubs and 40 trees) representing the major European ecosystem flora.
First, we analysed the climatic variability simulated by the climatic models over the historical period and compared it with the observed climatic variability. Then, we evaluated change in climatic variability and extreme events projected by the climatic models for the end of the century. Finally, we assessed the change in species productivity and abundance. We evaluated the severity of projected productivity change for the period 2070-2099 relative to their current productivity variability (period 1970-1999). Mean changes were considered severe if they exceed observed variability. The projections of potential shifts in species distributions are directly dedicated to current forest management.