97th ESA Annual Meeting (August 5 -- 10, 2012)

Thursday, August 9, 2012: 10:50 AM

D135, Oregon Convention Center

Hong Liu¹, Chang-Lin Feng², Xu Wang³, Miao-Bin Gu³, Yibo Luo⁴ and Zi-Bin Zhang⁵, (1)International Center for Tropical Botany, Department of Earth & Environment, International Center for Tropical Botany and Department of Earth and Environment, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, Miami, FL, (2)Experimental Center of Tropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Pingxing, China, (3)Research Institute of Tropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Guangzhou, China, (4)Laboratory of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, (5)Yachang National Orchid Nature Preserve, Baise, China

Background/Question/Methods

Global warming induced species migration to higher latitudes and elevations has been widely reported. Against the average pattern of global warming, however, there have been several extreme cold weather events in the past few years. These extreme cold events may play a significant role in affecting species migration from the tropical to the subtropical areas because unusual cold events, e.g. freezes, are known to shape species composition in subtropical regions. How this phenomenon impacts species that are recently migrated pole- and up-wards is largely unknown or unreported. In this study we carried out annual census from 2006 to 2011 for 20 species of wild orchids that were translocated to higher elevation sites in western Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and dozens of butterfly species in Nanling, Guangdong Provinces in Southern China. We examined the impacts of the 2008 extreme cold spell in southern China on a these species.

Results/Conclusions

About 10% of the upward translocated plants perished due to the direct impacts of the extreme cold spell in 2008, and this mortality occurred only in low elevation orchid species for which the translocation put them out of their natural elevational range. The cold led to a population extinction of a low elevation species, Vandopsis gigantean. The same weather event also impacted the Nanling mountain range in southern China. The reductions in the number of individuals as well as species of butterfly species were dramatic. Only 178 butterflies belonging to 49 species were detected in the 2008 survey. More importantly, however, was that the cold impact on the tropical butterflies species were disproportionally larger than that on the wide range species whose distribution extended into the temperate region. Before the cold event 47.5% of the individual butterflies were tropical. After the cold, only 24.5% were tropical. The combined reduction in the number of tropical butterfly species and individuals was twice as great as in the wide-ranging species. Together these results support the idea that extreme cold events may retard natural or assisted species migration

COS 132-9 - Extreme cold events may retard poleward and upward migrations in subtropical China