Climate change has been attributed as major factor resulting in the migration of tree range boundaries. However, the migration may not keep pace with Climate change, but lagged by the rate of range expansion to the suitable new region. The seed spread and competition between tree species is very slow process. Disturbance such as forest felling, fire, pests and diseases and changes in land use may affect the changes in tree range by modifying tree species composition and competition. This increased the complexity of the research of changes in tree range. Understanding and quantifying this lag effect is a challenge to ecology and preservation ecology.

The group led by Associate Professor LIANG Yu in the research group of Landscape Process, IAE, simulated a series of plan (intensity, strength and extent of disturbance) and corresponding change in the migration of tree range boundaries using LANIS model and then assess the effect of disturbance, seed dispersal, competition between tree species to the migration. The results show that, considering seed dispersal and competition, the migration rate of tree range is far lower than that of climate change. The boundary of most tree range migrates from south to north under the climate change. Disturbance may increase of tree regeneration and affect the tree species composition, but the effect on the migration rate of tree range boundary is not so significant.

The research results were published entitled as How Disturbance, Competition and Dispersal Interact to Prevent Tree Range Boundaries from Keeping Pace with Climate Change in Global Change Biology (IF= 8.502). LIANG Yu is the first author. The cooperative authors included Prof Jonathan Thompson from Harvard University, Prof Eric Gustafson from Forest Service USDA. The work was supported by Chinese National Key Basic Research Project and the Long Term Research Project provided by US National Science Foundation.