Quo Vadis, Orthotrichum pulchellum? A Journey of Epiphytic Moss across the European Continent

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Vítězslav Plášek - , University of Ostrava, University of Opole (Author)
  • Lukáš Číhal - , Silesian Museum (Author)
  • Frank Müller - , Chair of Botany, TUD Dresden University of Technology (Author)
  • Michał Smoczyk - , Stanisław Staszic High School in Rzepin (Author)
  • Ivana Marková - , Bohemian Switzerland National Park (Author)
  • Lucie Fialová - , University of Ostrava (Author)

Abstract

Orthotrichum pulchellum is a species of epiphytic moss in which a significant expansion from the oceanic part of Europe to the east of the continent has been observed in the recent two decades. The improvement in air quality in Central and Eastern Europe, but also climate change, probably plays a role in this. This study shows what direction of its spreading we can expect in the future. Ecological niche modeling (ENM) is a widespread method to find out species niches in environmental and geographical space, which allows us to highlight areas that have a higher probability of occurrences of the studied species, based on identifying similar environmental conditions to those already known. We also made predictions for different future scenarios (CMIP5 climatology datasets for the years 2041–2060). Because we were not able to distinguish between historical and newly settled areas, and so, had to use some of the traditional approaches when modeling invasive species, we proposed to use niche clusters based on environmental layers to split the data of all known occurrences and make models separately for each cluster. This approach seems reasonable from the ecological species point of view because using all the morphologically same samples could be misleading. Altogether, 2712 samples were used from three separate niche clusters. For building the models, the Maxent algorithm was used as a well-tested, well-accepted, and commonly used method.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number2669
JournalPlants
Volume11
Issue number20
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2022
Peer-reviewedYes

Keywords

Keywords

  • bryophytes, climate change, distribution, ecological requirements, epiphytic moss, expansion, Maxent, species distribution modeling