Predicting the future distributions of species under climate change requires an understanding of the factors that determine the dimensions of the species’ ecological niche. From a demographic perspective, the ecological niche is the set of conditions under which a species has a positive population growth rate. Most models of species distributions assume climate is the primary determinant of the ecological niche and therefore range limits, but biotic factors, such as competition, can also be important determinants of range limits. We use National Forest Inventory (NFI) data to account for the effects of both climate and competition.

Results

• Heiland, L., Kunstler, G., and Hülsmann, L. (2023) How do sapling and adult demography explain beech predominance along environmental gradients in Central European forests? bioRxiv. 2023.2011. 2023.568436 [journal]
• Heiland, L., Kunstler, G., Šebeň, V., and Hülsmann, L. (2023). Which demographic processes control competitive equilibria? Bayesian calibration of a size-structured forest population model. Ecology and Evolution. 13(7): e10232. [journal]
• Schultz, E. L., Hülsmann, L., Pillet, M. D., Hartig, F., Breshears, D. D., Record, S., Shaw, J. D., DeRose, R. J., Zuidema, P. A., and Evans, M. E. K., 2022. Climate-driven, but dynamic and complex? A reconciliation of competing hypotheses for species’ distributions. Ecology Letters. 25(1): 38-51. [journal]