2026/05/07 by Marc Grünig, Werner Rammer, Martin Baumann +36 · 1 voice
Environmental Science · #Climate change #Competition (biology) #Deciduous #Evergreen #Forest Insect Ecology and Management #Global change #Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics #Range (aeronautics) #Species Distribution and Climate Change #Temperate forest #Temperate rainforest
paper · doi:10.1038/s43247-026-03582-0
published in Communications Earth & Environment 7(1) (Nature Portfolio)
openalex publication_date 2026/05/07 · openalex created_date 2026/05/08 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Abstract Climate change is expected to alter species assemblages by affecting the outcome of competition between species. Investigating processes of competition remains challenging in tree communities, as they unfold over extensive spatio-temporal scales. Here, we used a deep learning-based meta-model trained on 135 million simulated tree responses to climate across Europe to investigate changes in the competitiveness of nine major tree species under future climate. We harnessed projections from local process models to train a Deep Neural Network of forest state transitions to investigate climate-induced changes in competition at continental scale. We found decreasing competitive strength for evergreen conifers across their distribution, while deciduous broadleaved species increased in competitiveness. Most investigated species lost competitive strength at their warm range edges. Consequently, up to 25% of Europe’s forests could experience a change in the dominant tree species until the end of the 21 st century, suggesting a profound climate-induced reassembly of Europe’s forests.