title: A novel approach for modelling vegetation distributions and analysing vegetation sensitivity through trait-climate relationships in China.
abstract: Increasing evidence indicates that current dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) have suffered from insufficient realism and are difficult to improve, particularly because they are built on plant functional type (PFT) schemes. Therefore, new approaches, such as plant trait-based methods, are urgently needed to replace PFT schemes when predicting the distribution of vegetation and investigating vegetation sensitivity. As an important direction towards constructing next-generation DGVMs based on plant functional traits, we propose a novel approach for modelling vegetation distributions and analysing vegetation sensitivity through trait-climate relationships in China. The results demonstrated that a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) trained with a LMA-Nmass-LAI data combination yielded an accuracy of 72.82% in simulating vegetation distribution, providing more detailed parameter information regarding community structures and ecosystem functions. The new approach also performed well in analyses of vegetation sensitivity to different climatic scenarios. Although the trait-climate relationship is not the only candidate useful for predicting vegetation distributions and analysing climatic sensitivity, it sheds new light on the development of next-generation trait-based DGVMs.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi, China.|Center for Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.
authors.forename: Yanzheng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi, China.
authors.forename: Qiuan
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology Sciences, Institute of Environment Sciences, University of Quebec at Montreal, Montreal, Canada.|State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi, China.
authors.forename: Changhui
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Peng
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi, China.
authors.forename: Han
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi, China.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Xue
authors.affiliation: Center for Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.
authors.forename: Guanghui
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi, China.
authors.forename: Zhongming
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wen
authors.affiliation: College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi, China.
authors.forename: Meng
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi, China.
authors.forename: Guobin
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi, China.
authors.forename: Shiqing
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Li
mesh_terms: D002681:China; D002980:Climate; D017753:Ecosystem; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D010944:Plants; D011336:Probability; D019655:Quantitative Trait, Heritable; D011891:Rain; D013696:Temperature