Upslope plant species shifts in Mesoamerican cloud forests driven by climate and land use change
Santiago Ramírez‐Barahona, Ángela P. Cuervo-Robayo, Kenneth J. Feeley, Andrés Ernesto Ortiz-Rodríguez, Antonio Acini Vásquez‐Aguilar, Juan Francisco Ornelas, Hernando Rodríguez‐Correa
Abstract
Global change drives biodiversity shifts worldwide, but these shifts are poorly understood in highly diverse tropical regions. In tropical mountains, plants are mostly expected to migrate upslope in response to warming. To assess this, we analyze shifts in elevation ranges of species in Mesoamerican cloud forests using three decades of species' occurrence records. Our findings reveal a mean upslope shift of 1.8 to 2.7 meters per year since 1979 driven by the upslope retreat of the less thermophilic montane species. These shifts are mostly accompanied by retreating lower and upper edges attributed to varying degrees of species' exposure to deforestation and climate change. Our results highlight the vulnerability of cloud forests under global change and the urgency to increase monitoring of species' responses.