Many plant species are predicted to migrate poleward in response to climate change. Species distribution models (SDMs) have been widely used to quantify future suitable habitats, but they often neglect soil properties, despite the importance of soil for plant fitness. As soil properties often change along latitudinal gradients, higher-latitude soils might be more or less suitable than average conditions within the current ranges of species, thereby accelerating or slowing potential poleward migration. In this study, we built three SDMs - one with only climate predictors, one with only soil predictors, and one with both - for each of 1870 plant species in Eastern North America, in order to investigate the relative importance of soil properties in determining plant distributions and poleward shifts under climate change. While climate variables were the most important predictors, soil properties also had a substantial influence on continental-scale plant distributions. Under future climate scenarios, models including soil predicted much smaller northward shifts in distributions than climate-only models (c. 40% reduction). Our findings strongly suggest that high-latitude soils are likely to impede ongoing plant migration, and they highlight the necessity of incorporating soil properties into models and predictions for plant distributions and migration under environmental change.
气候变化下许多植物会向更高纬度迁徙，物种分布模型常常被用来预测物种未来的适宜栖息地。虽然土壤对植物适合度至关重要，但以往的模型常常只关注气候因子而忽略土壤因子。事实上土壤也会随着纬度梯度剧烈变化 - 相比植物现在栖息地的土壤，更高纬度的土壤可能会不适合(或者更适合)来自低纬度的植物，进而影响植物的迁徙进程。 在这项研究中，我们对北美东部1870种植物构建物种分布模型:每个物种包括三个模型，一个只有气候预测因子，一个只有土壤预测因子，一个同时包括了土壤与气候， 然后我们通过对模型结果的比较来推断土壤对物种迁徙的影响。 在全模型中，虽然气候是最重要的预测因子，但是土壤也对物种的大尺度空间分布起到了关键作用。更重要的是，相对于只基于气候因子的预测，加入土壤因子后模型预测的植物向北迁徙距离将会大大减少(c. 40%)。 这些结果表明高纬度的土壤总体上不适合来自低纬度的植物，很可能会阻碍现在的植物迁徙。同时，在使用物种分布模型去推测植物分布变化时很有必要加入土壤因子。.
Keywords: climate warming; continent; migration; plants; soil; species distribution models.
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