Climatic niche plasticity in Populus tremuloides

Background/Question/Methods

Populus tremuloides (aspen) is North America's most widely distributed tree and thus inhabits an extremely wide range of environments. To better understand the role of climate in aspens niche, species distribution models utilizing aspen location data and climate summaries were developed.

Results/Conclusions

Separating aspen populations regionally improves the performance of the models (AUC of 0.84 to greater than 0.94 respectively) and overall, summer precipitation, and growing degree days are the most influential climatic summaries. Growing degree day or precipitation become stronger influences depending on region and these differences may explain why some areas suffer Sudden Aspen Decline and others do not.