Calibrating bioclimatic tolerance levels for three key Eastern Mediterranean species

This blog post offers an insider's view of the development of an innovative investigation into the bioclimatic tolerance levels of Pinus nigra, Pinus brutia and Cedrus libani in Turkey.

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Turkish natural landscape
Photo: Bikem Ekberzade

Our first article from a planned series of 3 articles came out from Biodiversity and Conservation this fall: “Simulating the potential forest ranges in an old land: the case for Turkey’s forests” where we published a series of re-calibrated bioclimatic tolerance limits that can be applied to process based dynamic vegetation models when simulating forest biomass for the Eastern Mediterranean.

Photo: Bikem Ekberzade

In this list I included three key species: Pinus nigra and brutia, as well as Cedrus libani. We hope this may help researchers who are struggling with calibrating these species’ bioclimatic tolerance levels in models.

I’m continuing to finetune existing, and define additional species’ traits to be used in models for the Eastern Mediterranean (mainly) and continuing to simulate with different climate datasets all possible outcomes of distribution/composition.

Photo: Bikem Ekberzade

Our second article is currently in the making, and for this, we included a larger window for our simulations than just Turkey, but expanded a bit further towards the Middle East and somewhat more towards the Caucasus. This planned triptych is also the core of my PhD research.

Read the full article

Full reference:

Ekberzade, B., Yetemen, O., Sen, O.L. et al. Simulating the potential forest ranges in an old land: the case for Turkey’s forestsBiodivers Conserv 31, 3217–3236 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-022-02485-8